


The Sky's Full of Tornadoes

by orphan_account



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/M, Family, Fluff, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Sibling Incest, Slow Build, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-27
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-10 14:17:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 65,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2028210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Except, Teddy.” She couldn’t keep the slight whine out of her voice. He didn’t look at her, but he had stopped moving again. “You can’t just leave James alone today.”</p><p>He turned. They looked at each other through the haze of fog. They were both wet, soaked to the skin with the slow chill of the mist. Lily’s hair was beginning to frizz around her face; she could see its clouds of red from the corners of her eyes. Teddy’s lips were pale with the cold. His eyes darkened as he looked at her. </p><p>“He needs to be alone.” </p><p>She shook her head. “Not him.”</p><p>“Yes, him. It’s how it works. Now,” Teddy glanced at the castle over his shoulder, at the greenhouses over hers, “you have somewhere you should be, and so do I. And this topic,” he shook his head, “I’m not sure what,” he took a deep breath, “it’s off limits.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [with_the_monsters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/with_the_monsters/gifts).



> This is a mammoth thing, and it's for Ellie again, because she made a post about a Lily/James/Teddy AU with soulmate marks on [Tumblr](http://asriels.tumblr.com/post/75405268642/jenny-i-dont-know-if-youre-online-right-now-but) and 5 months passed and this happened. It ended up veering rather sharply away from the plot Ellie outlined in her post, but I hope it's still likable. 
> 
> So. Warnings: This obviously involves sibling incest, as well as a polyamorous relationship. Again, it doesn't address the question of morality or, where it does, it dispenses with it rather carelessly. If any of that bothers you, please stay away. 
> 
> That being said, the relationship is a very slow build. For those of you who want insta-incest and/or polyamory, you also might not like this. I tried really hard to minimize the angst but somehow angst-levels seriously exploded around the second paragraph and I couldn't rein them in.
> 
> I'm mostly done with it, so I'm going to try to keep myself to a posting schedule of one chapter every three days. We shall see. 
> 
> For those of you who haven't run away screaming yet, I hope you enjoy!

When Ginny first saw James’s wrist, skin perfect, reddish, and soft, so soft, she was astonished and a little horrified to see that rather than the single row of symbols most people had at the web of veins at their wrist, James had two. _TL_ in black, and below the letters, two horizontal lines, which indicated that his soulmate had not yet been born. His _second_ soulmate. Ginny had never heard of such a thing; the sight was a shock.

Harry saw the expression on her face and rested a hand on her shoulder as his nose inched near hers and their son’s. He saw the four marks, but his expression didn’t change. “He’s just got two chances,” he murmured into Ginny’s hair where it was pushed back from her damp forehead. “That’s all it means.”

Ginny accepted Harry’s explanation because it was easier than thinking about the other possibilities, all of which were dangerous and carried too much potential for heartache. Besides, when her son laughed she forgot about everything else in the world. So she and Harry laced the green and gold bracelet Molly had made for James around his little wrist, and Ginny, at least, endeavored to forget about the extra lines.

She knew it was lucky that no one else, aside from the healers, had seen James’s soulmate marks. Healers signed privacy contracts—if they talked, they would be struck by fierce enough lawsuits to render them unemployable. Given the healers’ fear, Ginny was confident that James’s letters would stay a secret at least until his eighteenth birthday, when he could undo the bracelet for the first time.

The removal of the bracelet was a private thing. It had been spelled to grow as he grew and had been woven with a self-cleaning charm; if he chose to, he could leave his wrist covered after he was eighteen. He could leave his bracelet on forever, even after his soulmate(s?) also turned eighteen, when those letters would shrink to allow arrows to form beside them, compasses on his skin, directing him to the person (people?) he was meant to be with.

The questions worried Ginny. They didn’t seem to worry Harry, but she couldn’t know for sure, because after they wrapped James’s wrist in the bracelet, she and Harry didn’t mention his two soulmate marks for a long time.

:::

Albus’s birth was difficult, but Ginny, exhausted, still found it in her to be relieved at the sight of one set of initials sitting alone on his skin.

:::

Ginny was out of it for Lily. She was just waking up when the healers handed Harry his daughter. Harry took one look at her wrist and fished in his pocket for the bracelet, identical to James’s and Albus’s.

Ginny never mentioned James’s soulmate marks, and so Harry knew she still worried about them. Harry barely registered the letters on Lily’s skin, just saw that there were four of them and tied her bracelet tightly around her wrist.

She punched at him, a tiny fist against his palm, and then wrapped her fingers around his index finger. He kissed the top of her head and said, voice barely a breath at the shoulder of a bleary-eyed Ginny, “Please don’t let your life be too hard.” But he knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

:::

It probably would have happened sooner if James hadn’t been rubbish at charm work, but he was, and Rose claimed to have no interest in what lay under their bracelets. James thought she was probably just concerned that, after undoing the spell, it would be impossible to re-set.

Albus, though. His only good class was Charms. The idea of untying the bracelets came to him between his second and third years, and he turned it into a dare to get the others involved.

Hugo and James sat in the doorway to Lily’s room, watching the hallway to make sure their parents didn’t come up the stairs. Hugo kept laughing under his breath, like this was some great game. James thought he might be sick. He wasn’t worried about getting caught, but the thought of finding out what was under his bracelet terrified him. This was a forbidden thing. You didn’t look before you were eighteen. In all of his rule-breaking and truth-bending, he had never broken a rule that governed the whole freaking world. But he was too tempted, too curious, and was not about to be labeled a wuss by his younger cousins and siblings, so he sat by Hugo in the door and stared down the hall, the constant pressure of his teeth at his lower lip the only reflection of how he felt.

Lily and Rose and Albus sat on the floor by the wardrobe. Albus had his wand pointed at Rose’s wrist, where she held it out between the three of them. She had her cheeks sucked in. She looked pale and scared. “What if I don’t have anything there?”

“You have someone,” James scoffed. “Everyone has someone.”

“Not everyone. Uncle Charlie doesn’t,” Hugo pointed out. James elbowed him.

“Uncle Charlie’s different.” Lily poked Albus’s knee. “You will, Rose. Go on, Al.”

Al cast the charm. It was a quick easy thing, a twist of his wand and a few muttered words. Rose’s bracelet, blue and gold, fell off, landing in a coil on the wood floor. She stared at the skin of her wrist. It was white, bare of freckles and the slight tan Rose managed in the summer. She mouthed the letters. She coughed. “RN,” she said.

James tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. He couldn’t think of anyone with those initials at Hogwarts.

“Not a Scamander, then.” Lily’s voice had a catch of amusement to it, and James shot her a look.

She shrugged at him as Rose said, defensive, “It’s not like I thought it would be.”

“You were hoping though, weren’t you? Lysander and Rose, sitting in a tree.” Hugo stuck his tongue out. Rose tugged a pillow from Lily’s bed and chucked it at him.

“I hate you,” she told her brother. “Al, can you get that back on? Please?”

Albus lifted the bracelet and tied it back in place.

“That’s it?” James asked, watching as Rose drew her wrist to her chest and turned the bracelet around. It didn’t slip to reveal any white skin.

“It’s not the getting on that’s the hard part. Once it’s on it stays, unless you do what I just did. Or turn eighteen, obviously.”

James shrugged and looked out the door again. The sounds of his parents and aunt and uncle, which had been drifting intermittently up the stairs, had stopped. “Who’s next?”

“I want to.” Hugo slid across the floor to sit beside Al. He held his arm out to his cousin.

Albus repeated the spell quickly. Hugo’s bracelet, identical to Rose’s, fell to the floor. “LS,” Hugo read, holding his wrist up to his eyes.

“Huh.” Lily picked up his bracelet and handed it to Al. “You could have a Scamander twin, Hugo.”

Hugo wrinkled his nose. “Too old,” he protested. “Also which one? That’s not fair, that they’ve both got the same initials.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about it for a while, do you?” Rose bit off each word.

Hugo looked at his bent knees.

“You next, Lil?” Albus held his wand out. Lily looked at her wrist.

“Why not you?”

“Oh.” Al grinned. “I already looked.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course. I wasn’t going to use Rosie as my test rabbit. That wouldn’t be nice.”

“Don’t call me that. Also, I appreciate your thoughtfulness. And further, what were your initials?”

“ST.”

“Really, you’re sure they weren’t SM?” Lily asked. “He’ll be disappointed.”

“Shut it, it’s your turn.” Albus reached for Lily’s hand. She almost pulled back, James saw. He watched curiously as Albus tapped his wand against Lily’s wrist and said the spell.

And then his mother was standing behind him. “What,” her voice hot with rage, “are you doing?”

Lily snatched her wrist away from Albus; everyone’s attention had shifted to the red-faced Ginny standing in the doorway. Lily scrabbled to get her bracelet from the floor, she wrapped it around her wrist while Ginny watched, pulling it tight with her teeth as their mother stepped over James and came to tower over the circle at the center of the room. “Albus,” Ginny seemed to be having trouble coming up with words, “your room. Now.”

James didn’t move from the doorway. Albus walked past him. His face was a pale, sickly color. “She won’t kill you. Much,” James muttered, but Al shook his head.

“James,” Ginny snapped. “Get over here.”

She lined them up, Lily and James and Hugo and Rose. “Whose idea was this?”

“All of ours,” Rose lied. “It wasn’t anything.” Her voice was shaking, but the way she met Ginny’s gaze impressed James.

“There are reasons you’re not supposed to look. You all know that, don’t you?” Ginny’s voice was unsteady, too, and that was surprising. She usually got stronger the angrier she was, a rising wave, not a receding tide. “Which of you undid yours?”

“I didn’t,” James told her.

“And me,” Lily hurried. “I didn’t look. But even if I had, we don’t know who the initials mean, do we? What does it matter?”

Ginny’s shoulders seemed to drop a little, and her explanation, when it came, was in a calmer tone.

“It matters because when you meet a person with those initials, you might immediately think they’re the person for you, but that might not be the case. There might be someone else. You could be seeing someone else, and it wouldn’t be fair to that person, for you to drop them for someone who has the same initials as your soulmate—even when that person might not actually _be_ your soulmate. Or, if they were your soulmate, your soulmate at fourteen is not your soulmate at eighteen, and you might not work well together before you’re old enough. Knowing what your mark says—that could rush things, do you see? No one wants love to be rushed. That can ruin it.”

James rubbed at his forehead. “But I don’t get it. What if you’re not ready when you turn eighteen, what if you’re dating someone when you turn eighteen? That’s the same situation, right? It’s still not fair to whoever you’re seeing. At least if you know the initials, then you know not to date certain people. At least you won’t be wasting your time.”

“It’s not a waste of time,” Ginny protested. “I know people who’ve married people who are not their soulmates. Haven’t we told you so many times, that it is not a sure thing? That nothing is definite, not even soulmates. If two people are happy together, if they’re in love, and the marks on their wrists don’t complement each other—well, those marks might end up meaning nothing.”

“Do people do that? Do they ignore their initials?”

“They do.” Ginny looked from one child to the next. “They do, and you should all remember that whatever happens you have that right. Whatever you saw today, try not to let it affect you. Don’t let it decide your futures. Please.”

Rose tossed her curls over her shoulder. The move was practiced, one James saw her use at school a lot. She had never used it in front of his mother before, and it signaled a type of nervousness he had never expected from her around their family.

“Of course not.” Rose looked right at Ginny. James shifted closer to Lily, trying to tell her non-verbally that she should nudge Rose and get her to shut up. Lily inched away from him, but she didn’t do anything to Rose, who continued, “Why would this change our lives? It’s always been my goal to end up with someone who is not my soulmate.”

Ginny narrowed her eyes. “You know,” she said, voice dangerously low, “it sometimes works out better. Harry’s,” and then she bit her lip, shook her head. “You need to understand this. Who a person is when you’re born is not who they are when they grow up. So if you’re connected to someone from birth, well. Your birth doesn’t predict the future, that’s all. Things change.”

“You and Dad were soulmates, weren’t you?” Lily asked, voice steady.

“Yes.” Ginny’s wrist was plainly marked HP. The arrow had long since faded.

“So why can’t we want that?” Lily was shifting her weight from foot to foot, not lifting them off the floor as she swayed beside James.

“You can,” Ginny spread her hands out, “you _can_ , but you shouldn’t plan on it. I just want you to understand that a life with your soulmate is not the only future open to you.”

Lily opened her mouth to say something else, but before she could Hugo asked, “Are you going to tell our parents?”

Ginny rolled her lips between her teeth. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I think I should. They might want to add something to what I said. And,” she glared at each child in turn; James met her gaze with difficulty, “it’s not within my rights to punish you. My two are going to be grounded for the next two weeks. No friends, no Quidditch, just summer coursework. Even for you, Lily. I’m sure Albus’s books will help you prepare for first year. Now, you two,” she gestured at Rose and Hugo, “downstairs. I need to go talk to Albus, and then I will be speaking to your parents.”

James flopped back on Lily’s bed as Ginny exited the room. Lily slid to the floor, her back against the doors of her wardrobe.

“Did you really not look?” He could just see her mess of red hair over the tops of his socked toes.

“I really didn’t,” Lily said, after a long enough pause for James to doubt her. “Mum just looked so angry, I couldn’t do it with her standing there.”

“Yeah, but,” James started.

“I didn’t,” Lily interrupted. “Really and truly.”

“Sure.” He waved his feet back and forth. “That was a rubbish idea, wasn’t it.”

He didn’t think she was going to answer, and so was surprised when she said, “I don’t know. I think the secrecy about it is stupid.”

“You haven’t been to Hogwarts yet.” James kicked his heels over the end of her bed. “You wait. Once you’re a third year, you’ll probably be glad you don’t know.”

“Why’d you want to look, then?” Lily asked.

“Curiosity, a little. Mostly I didn’t want to.” He rolled off her bed. “And in the end I didn’t have to, did I?”

“Yeah, but it’s not like you wouldn’t have if Mum hadn’t come up.”

James shrugged. “Luck, isn’t it? I’ll see you later. I want to go hear what Mum does to Al.”

“She’ll send you to your room when she catches you.”

“We’re already grounded. It’s not like she’ll lock me up.”

Lily scrambled to her feet and followed James from the room. He didn’t look back as they crept up the stairs to Al’s room, which was tucked into the eaves of their house. Lily leaned close and pressed her ear to the crack beneath the door, but she shook her head; she could hear nothing.

She slid down the stairs and disappeared back in her bedroom. James waited a few minutes before returning to his.

:::

Lily had been lying awake for hours in the dense stillness of her room when the door creaked open and Albus’s step sounded on the floor.

“Well?” She didn’t move from where she was lying, staring up at the dark ceiling. He perched beside her, kicking his legs up onto her mattress.

“I saw your wrist before Mum came in. You did too, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” The word was uninviting.

“Lily, I didn’t expect,” he began, but Lily rolled over and pinned his shoulders to her bed with her small hands.

“I am too young,” she told him, “for you to talk about this with me. I am not thinking about it yet. I am going to concentrate on not thinking about it from now until I am old enough to understand. And if I’m never old enough to understand, then I am going to spend my whole life _not thinking about it_ , okay? I shouldn’t know, but at the same time I’m glad I do, because now I know I have to ignore it.”

“Lily.” Albus’s voice was almost pleading. She lifted her hands and fell back against her pillows.

“It’s not your fault, all right? Don’t feel bad. It’s just the way it is, sometimes, I guess. Fate has our lives picked out, but Mum just said that we can decide that we don’t want that life. So I’m going to do that. And you’re going to stop worrying.”

“But you should be,” Albus started again.

“What I should be,” Lily told him, tone mock serious, “is asleep, as Dad would say. So go on, get to bed. Or if you have to stay, then stay, but shut up.”

“Fine, fine, whatever.”

Albus kicked his bare feet under her covers and began fake snoring. Lily only elbowed him once in protest before she drifted off.

 


	2. chapter one

“This is bullshit,” Lily’s best friend Ris Parkinson protested, throwing a mitten at a shivering tentacly plant thing Professor Longbottom had assigned them the task of warming up.

“Can we just set it on fire?” Lily suggested.

“Or a fire near it?” Hugo asked, loudly enough that Professor Longbottom heard him.

“Inadvisable.” He approached their table. “Did none of you do the reading?”

“I stopped before it got to…these.” Ris jabbed her wand at one of the plant’s arms, which jabbed back at her.

Lily was watching Neville. He had spent enough time with her family that she recognized the tight expression on his face. He was struggling to suppress a smile.

“I didn’t even start,” Lily confessed. “Because did you see the sky last night? The stars were pretty much low enough to touch the castle.”

Neville’s smile broke out. “It was very lovely. But,” he shook his head, granting the three of them an attempt at a disappointed frown, “you all can’t just ignore your coursework because it bores you or because the sky’s clear.”

“Last time, I promise.” Lily drew an x over her chest. Neville rolled his eyes.

“You can’t set a fire near the Raging Nifforous because it reacts explosively to flames. The greenhouse—and all of us—would not survive.”

“Okay,” Hugo drew the word out, tucking his wand behind his ear. “So, how do we warm it up? Brew it hot chocolate?”

Neville’s answering grin was bright. “Getting warmer.” He turned, shoulders shaking with laughter at his own joke, and Ris stuck her tongue out at his back.

“Rude,” she muttered, stabbing her wand into the dirt at the base of the plant. It waved its arms at her.

Wren Nott kept glancing over from the table beside theirs, where he and his twin Regina were trying to convince a spiny tubular plant to retract its spines. When one of the tentacles met Ris’s hand and left her skin white with cold, he whispered across the narrow space between their tables, “Can we trade?”

Lily shot a glance at he and Regina, who had both cast shield Charms against their plant.

“What makes you think you’ll handle this any better?”

“I did the reading.” Regina moved to stand beside Hugo and directed her wand at the soil in the pot. “You just pour hot water in there,” she muttered a variation on _Aguamenti_ that Lily had never heard before, and steaming water spurted from her wand’s tip, “and the plant stops shaking.” And it did. It also turned a rosy pink color.

“I liked it better when it was purple,” Ris said. “However,” she added, after an elbow-jab from Lily, “thank you for fixing it.”

 “Now,” Wren waved his hands toward the spiky plant, “do any of you know what to do with this one?”

“I thought you did the reading,” Hugo’s tone was snider than usual.

Regina raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, well, it didn’t mention monstrous poisonous cactus _things_ , so.”

“I bet if we sweet talk it it’ll calm down,” Lily suggested. “Just say something nice, Reggie.”

Regina looked at the plant, her eyes narrowed. “You’re a very pretty spiny plant. Please take your spines away.”

“That was rubbish.”

Lily caught sight of a familiar shape passing the greenhouse, distorted by the mist beyond the glass walls but still easily recognizable. She squeezed Ris’s wrist. “I’ll be right back. You guys keep it up. That was a good effort.”

“Right, whatever, Potter.”

Lily hurried from the greenhouse, not even trying to be covert about it. If Professor Longbottom saw her leave, he didn’t say anything.

Teddy was halfway up to the school by the time she caught him.

“Professor Lupin.” It was grey and wet, late November. Lily was half-sunk in muck when she stopped.

He turned on his heel slowly, his expression tight when he finally faced her. He was still a few feet up the hill, and the distance made him seem much taller, miles above her.

“Miss Potter,” his tone was resigned, “aren’t you meant to be in class?”

“Yes, absolutely.” Lily nodded. “I just have two quick questions for you.”

“Do they have to do with Potions?” Teddy pushed some dark hair out of his eyes. It was damp with the mist, and a few water droplets trailed down between his eyebrows.

“Not in the slightest.”

Teddy looked as if he was about to turn and continue his walk to the castle. Lily held up a finger and talked fast, “First, do you know how to make a spiny plant’s spines retract?”

He stared at her. “A what’s what?” And then his gaze jerked over her shoulder toward the greenhouse, and his mouth softened. “Neville’s still using that one? They don’t retract. That’s first year stuff about the nature of magical plants, Lil—Miss Potter. If it has spines, its spines stay out.”

“Oh.” Lily rubbed a hand over her forehead. “Of _course_ they do. Neville’s such a trickster.”

“Great, so, you’re welcome.” Teddy did turn then, and Lily spoke loudly to his back.

“The second thing,” her voice sounded brittle, and she swallowed it back, continuing after Teddy stopped, still facing away from her, “is that today is James’s birthday.”

Teddy glanced over his shoulder. “Yes.”

“He turns eighteen.” Lily took a few steps closer to him. “And I can’t be there. Are you going?”

Teddy shook his head. “I’m teaching an advanced class on Veritaserum tonight.” He clipped each word off quickly.

“You’re not,” Lily cut herself off. “Fine. But, wait.” Because Teddy was starting back toward the castle again. “You’re not actually going to teach anyone to make Veritaserum, are you? That’s a spectacularly bad idea.”

“It’s a history lesson, Potter. I’m not an idiot.”

“Right.” Lily gripped her wrist. The bracelet was cool against her palm. “Except, Teddy.” She couldn’t keep the slight whine out of her voice. He didn’t look at her, but he had stopped moving again. “You can’t just leave James alone today.”

He turned. They looked at each other through the haze of fog. They were both wet, soaked to the skin with the slow chill of the mist. Lily’s hair was beginning to frizz around her face; she could see its clouds of red from the corners of her eyes. Teddy’s lips were pale with the cold. His eyes darkened as he looked at her.

“He needs to be alone.”

She shook her head. “Not him.”

“Yes, him. It’s how it works. Now,” Teddy glanced at the castle over his shoulder, at the greenhouses over hers, “you have somewhere you should be, and so do I. And this topic,” he shook his head, “I’m not sure what,” he took a deep breath, “it’s off limits.”

Lily watched until the castle doors shut behind him.

:::

James leaned against the door of his bedroom. He was eighteen and several hours old, and all day he’d been scratching at the suddenly oppressive bracelet on his wrist. He’d almost taken it off after his third shot at the club, but Lucy had grabbed his hand and pressed her mouth against his ear.

“Believe me, you want to do it in private.” Her hand fastened hot over the bracelet and his fumbling fingers fell away. “Come on,” she had said, “come dance."

And he managed not to think about the soulmate mark for the next few hours, mostly due to Lucy’s hands appearing at his shoulders whenever he drifted too near the edges of the dance floor, guiding him toward someone new to dance with.

But here he was alone in his bedroom and the spell on his bracelet was long gone. He didn’t need Al’s talented wand-work, and he didn’t have Lucy there to keep his fingers from working at the ties of the bracelet. So he loosened it, sliding it over his hand and setting it on his bedside table before he flipped his wrist.

And stared.

Two sets of initials. The first, _TL_ , had a small arrow beside it, pointing northeast.

The second, _LP_ , sat, thicker and larger than the first, more on his forearm than his wrist. It was centered over the rise of his tendons, as it didn’t yet need to share space on his skin with a pseudo-compass.

He wasn’t absolutely positive who the initials signified. He was particularly unsure about the second set. He wanted to be unsure about the second set. But the first? He had an idea.

He reached for his bracelet, hands suddenly shaking, and slid it back on. He tightened it with his teeth, the way he remembered Lily doing back when they all sat on the floor of her bedroom and looked. Except him. And Lily herself, he remembered.

And what providence that was, that Albus hadn’t had a chance to remove his bracelet back then. How would he have reacted to two sets of letters? To _those_ sets of letters?

Seven years ago Teddy turned eighteen and stopped coming around. James remembered that. He never knew why; he had barely speculated. He had asked Lily once, what she thought, and she had said, “It’s not cool to hang out with kids, James,” and he’d let it go.

But here he was, eighteen, and Teddy’s initials were on his skin. Had that been a rejection all those years ago? Was it a rejection now, with Teddy cozied away at Hogwarts and James alone in his flat? What if it wasn’t even Teddy? There were other _TL_ s in the world.

James left his flat by the front door. None of his usual clubs were still open, it was past four. He went to an all-night diner, ordered a coffee, dosed it liberally with sugar and whiskey, and sat in a corner booth sipping until the sun was up.

He wasn’t sure where to go. He wanted to find his parents and get an explanation out of them, but his brain kept rewinding to his mum’s face, that day they looked, and how relieved she had seemed when he told her he hadn’t seen his mark. He kept remembering that what his parents wanted was what was best for him, and they wanted to deny this. So he ought to deny it, of course, for their sakes, if not for his.

But he wanted that out of their mouths. He wanted those words— _keep it a secret_ —out of their mouths. He wanted it in a past sense. Like they could have told him early on, that his marks were plural and therefore abnormal.

They shouldn’t have left him to find it alone, drunk, on his birthday.

He wanted to know if the first was Teddy.

He really wanted to know if it was Teddy.

He paid his bill, then wandered down a few side streets until he found an alley that would effectively shield a Disapparation. He gripped his wand beneath his jacket, shut his eyes, and turned.

He appeared in front of the gates to Hogwarts, just over the edge of the school’s Anti-Apparation Charm, just outside the limits of the Map. He loosened his bracelet and slid it down his arm so he could make out the arrow beside the first set of initials.

It was pointing towards Hogwarts, of course, and glowing gold. James let the bracelet fall back into place and tightened it. He stood there, staring up at the massiveness of the castle, the walls a deep spotted grey in the early morning light. He thought about it.

In the end it was the second set of letters that decided him. He turned and disappeared.

His parents were waiting for him, sitting at the kitchen table with three cups of strong coffee in front of them. He took a long drink from the center one but did not sit. “You could have told me.”

“Yes,” his dad admitted. “We probably should have.”

“I didn’t know how to,” his mum said. “I’m sorry.”

“What do you think it means?” James pressed his braceletted wrist against his stomach, afraid their eyes would see through it, ashamed of what the letters meant. Wondering if the letters would mean the same to his parents as they did to him.

“I think it means you have two shots,” Harry said, “two options.” But he didn’t sound certain.

Ginny shook her head. She rested her hand on Harry’s leg and said, “Neither of us is sure, James. I’m sorry, we’ve never heard of anything like it.”

James looked between his parents. “And neither of you thought to research it?”

Harry swallowed visibly. “I did, a little. There are some very old, very secret files at the Ministry that deal with multiple soulmates. But the studies were inconclusive.”

“Did they at least _try_ to make conclusions?”

He tilted his head to the side. “Not many. Typically…it’s not just you, with the two. You’ve probably guessed that. The soulmate mark is not so unfair as to link you with someone who is not also linked with you. There were cases of groups of up to four people, although those were significantly more rare.”

“What did they do, though, the people with more than one soulmate?”

Harry shook his head. “One of the reasons the studies were inconclusive was that once the Ministry tracked them down the people usually hid. None of the officials got any useful information off anyone.” He lowered his eyes. “Or, not any information that they kept in their files.”

“Why? Why would the Ministry care?”

Ginny glanced at Harry. Her eyes were narrowed, her lips pressed tight. James didn’t think she had known about Harry’s research.

“Because they care about everything unusual. Especially at the time those studies were commissioned, which was right about the start of the First Wizarding War, when they were interested in anything out of the ordinary. I’m sorry, James. I can’t tell you what to do.” And then he took a deep breath.

“We will not tell you what to do.” Ginny shook her head when Harry reached for her hand, but she let him take it as she continued, “And neither of us will tell you what not to do.”

They both looked up at him. “This is your choice,” Harry said.

“We wanted you to be able to grow up without thinking about it,” Ginny explained. “That was wrong, I know it, but,” she looked down at her hands, “it seemed easiest.”

James nodded. “I understand why,” he said, “but I think it was a mistake. Anyway.” He set his coffee down on the table and rocked on his heels. “I think I know what I’m going to do. I’ll keep you updated.”

“James,” Harry started, but the crack of James’s Disapparation covered the word.

:::

Teddy had just poured boiling water into a mug holding two teaspoons of instant coffee when the knocking started. He exhaled, scratched a fingertip beneath the black and green bracelet at his wrist, and stirred the coffee. And then he answered the door.

Lily’s fists were raised, halfway to another insistent knock. She lowered them as her eyes flicked up to meet Teddy’s. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Teddy glanced behind her, to the dimly lit corridor leading up from the dungeons. It seemed empty, but even the portraits listened in this place. He stepped back to let her in.

She strode past him, turning on her heel just beside the table by the door. Teddy let it fall shut and faced her. 

“What have I done?” He used his best professor voice, even and controlled.

She reached for him, tightening one hand around his forearm before he realized what she was doing. She fumbled at his bracelet.

“Don’t,” Teddy hissed.

Lily looked up at him as her fingers untied the knot he had redone just minutes before she came down. Her lips were curled with distaste. Her eyes were flint. “What game are you playing, _Professor_? You think if you deny it it’ll go away?” She dropped the bracelet to the floor.

Her fingernail tapped against the _JP_ and the two-day-old arrow beside it.

“If James were in London, like he is supposed to be, that would be pointing in the other direction. Wouldn’t it, Teddy?”

Teddy swallowed. “How do you,” he started.

“ _I_ don’t bloody matter. What matters is that James,” her nail dug into the skin, “is not in London where he is supposed to be. And James isn’t here, either, where he could be. And you don’t care?” Lily looked up at him, eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you care?”

“Where is he, then?” Teddy asked. He tried to pull his wrist away, but she wouldn’t let go. He thought she might be trying to make him bleed.

“In Romania,” Lily answered. “With our uncle Charlie. My parents sent an owl today.”

“Well, he’s fine, then. He’ll need time to work through this.”

“Work through it alone, you mean? Because you think everyone should be alone?”

“I think.” Teddy finally succeeded in freeing himself, and he knelt to pick up his bracelet. Lily’s foot came down on his hand as it hit the floor, the toe of her Oxford pressing his knuckles against the carpeting. He looked up at her. “I think,” he repeated, nose level with the torn knee of her jeans, “James deserves the right to make his own choices.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t even know what the options are.” Lily lifted her foot and Teddy slid his hand and bracelet from beneath it. He refastened it while still kneeling on the floor.

“We can’t talk about this.” Teddy pushed to his feet.

“I’m not talking about _this_.” Lily gestured between the two of them. “I’m talking about you,” she pointed at him, “and my brother, who is probably taunting dragons right now. He’s probably going to get burnt to a crisp, and it will be your fault.”

“Why didn’t you talk to him?” Teddy asked.

“Because it’s not ‘right,’” her fingers made delicate work of the air quotes, “but you two could be, couldn’t you? And if you don’t want him, then fine, you’re an idiot, but you should at least _talk_ to him. It’s not fair, you knew what to expect. You knew, and you didn’t say anything.”

“You knew too. Since you were little, right? Since that time your dad told me about, when Albus undid your charms?”

“Yeah, since then. Since I was eleven, and I dealt with it better than either of you. You hide yourself here, where you can’t do anything, and James runs away.” Lily shook her head. “Fucking pathetic.”

Teddy’s hands fisted at his sides. “You don’t have to deal with it,” he pointed out. “You’re too young, you’re—you’re just too young. You shouldn’t know, but you can’t—this isn’t right,” he repeated, “you being here.”

“I know that.” Lily stomped her foot. “I know that, but I’m here because you and James are cowards. You could have it easy, the two of you.”

“No.” Teddy shook his head. “You’re wrong. None of us gets to have it easy.”

Lily was still so young. He saw in the way she leaned back and forward, rocking on her heels. From the faded ink drawings on the backs of her hands. “You and he could have it _easier_ , then. You could.”

“You don’t know.”

“You don’t either, do you? You’ve never let yourself think.” She waved her arms around, taking in the whole room, which made up one-third of all the space he considered his own in the world, and said, “You got yourself a cave and decided to stay here, never thinking what would happen when we grew up. We’re growing, Teddy. James is grown. You’re being selfish and I’m asking,” she nodded, her voice catching, “I am _asking_ that you stop. Please just talk to him.”

Teddy rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I. He won’t want to talk to me.”

“You can’t know that, all right? You can’t. You’ve got to try.”

“Okay.” Lily blinked at him. “Okay,” he told her. “All right, I’ll try. But you can’t—I mean, however it goes? Don’t hold it against me, us, whatever. It’s a. Well, you know. It’s a weird thing.”

Lily took a step back. “I can’t tell how I’ll react. I can’t tell yet how you’ll fuck it up. But I do know. I’ll try, okay? You’re trying. I’ll try. James,” she shook her head, “maybe I should have said something? But I was little, and I didn’t know.”

“You’re still young,” Teddy reminded her, and he expected a fiery response to that, an acidic denial.

Lily just dropped her head. “Yeah, in some ways. But I knew.” She shrugged. “Anyway.” She reached behind her for the doorknob, turned it without turning around. “Just talk to him. I imagine I’ll hear how it goes.”

Teddy stepped toward her as she pulled the door open. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do—hug her, ruffle her hair—something innocent, some sign they weren’t in a new terrifying territory. But Lily ducked from him, turning and stepping from his rooms.

He was about to offer her a promise, a commitment, possibly an erasure of the entire conversation, for purposes of him still being her bloody professor, _fuck_ , but he caught sight of Albus sitting against the wall a little ways down the hall, his long legs stretched in front of him and his head tilted back against the stones.

Albus pushed to his feet when Lily joined him, and he took her hand and led her down the dim hall, only glancing over his shoulder at Teddy once.

His expression was not kind.

:::

James didn’t consider it running away, exactly. It was more like following a non-linear career path. No one had expected him to work with dragons. He hadn’t even taken Care of Magical Creatures past fourth year (not that he hadn’t liked Care of Magical Creatures, which he had adamantly explained to his uncle Charlie when he first arrived at the door to his house. He had enjoyed the course material itself. But Professor Sweeney had been young and attractive, and Lucy had stopped by during classes to flirt with him, which was utterly unbearable. Also, although he did not tell his uncle Charlie this, he had not wanted to be culpable when that all went pear-shaped. Which it hadn’t, but only because Lucy was absurdly lucky and Albus had connections.). Anyway, James and dragons? Not a match anyone would have anticipated.

But James found himself at his uncle Charlie’s the day after his birthday, and he didn’t even try to come up with a believable explanation when his uncle answered the door bleary-eyed and barefoot.

“I came for the dragons,” James said, and his uncle blinked at him, then nodded, stepped back enough for James to come inside, and shut the door behind him.

“The guest bedroom’s across from the kitchen.”

And that was it. Charlie introduced him around, took him on hikes, taught him about dragons. For two days, it was like he had come to a sort of dragon camp.

And then Sunday evening rolled around. Charlie was out, and James was on the couch in the living room, reading _A Definitive History of Dragons_ by the light of the fire, looking up only when the light dimmed because Teddy’s head had appeared, taking up most of the space in the grate.

“Hi, James. Mind if I come through?” His voice sounded distant.

“It’ll take you ages.” James didn’t move from the couch. Floo was an imperfect magic, and the distance between them outside their fireplaces affected its efficiency. He didn’t want Teddy to come through, but he also didn’t expect him to.

“Only about twenty minutes.” Teddy’s head disappeared, the room returned to its orange brightness.

“That wasn’t a yes, you wanker.” But there was no way for Teddy to hear him.

James thought about what to say when Teddy arrived. He undid his bracelet. The arrow beside Teddy’s initials was spinning in frantic circles. The _LP_ sat unchanged. He retied his bracelet. He made coffee, then poured it down the drain. He preheated the oven, slid in a frozen pizza, and set the timer.

A wave of heat preceded Teddy’s arrival, and then his former professor was shaking his limbs out and wiping soot across his face in an effort to clean it off. He looked a little green.

“Water?” James held out a glass.

Teddy took it from him on his second try. “Thanks.” Teddy took a drink.

James looked at his feet. Teddy was wearing socks, unprepared for November in Romania. Which meant, of course, he wasn’t staying. But James had known that. It was a Sunday; Teddy had classes on Monday. And he didn’t want Teddy to stay, anyway.

“Is your uncle here?” Teddy asked. James glanced at him. Teddy squeezed his eyes shut for a bare moment, as if embarrassed.

“Rather blunt, isn’t that?” James led him into the kitchen.

“I didn’t mean,” Teddy began, “I just wanted to say hi, if he was in.”

“Yeah, of course.” James leaned against the counter and studied the egg-timer, which was counting down to the time when he could occupy himself by removing the pizza and cutting the pizza and eating the pizza. “He’s not.” James shrugged. “He’s out with friends.”

Teddy nodded, scuffed one sock against the tile floor. “Do you mind if I sit?”

“Go ahead.”

He pulled out a chair at the table.

“Are—how are you?” he asked. James looked at him. His eyes were dark, hair dark, lips pressed together. He looked tired and anxious. He didn’t want to be here.

“Why’re you here, Lupin?”

Teddy blinked. His last name had felt weird in James’s mouth; even when he was at Hogwarts, he’d flaunted tradition and called Teddy by his first name. But that was expected now.

“You’re angry with me.”

“Yeah, of course I am. But that doesn’t bother you.”

“It bothers me,” Teddy told him. “I don’t want you to be mad. I want you to—I would like for you to understand.”

“What do you want me to understand?” James asked. “It’s basically a rejection, right? You cut us—me—out when you realized what I would be—could be—to you, and then when I found out—when you knew I’d find out—you left me alone? That’s a rejection.” James exhaled. “I don’t get why you’re here.”

“I didn’t mean for you to see it that way.” Teddy’s voice was even.

“What did you want me to think?”

“I thought,” Teddy shook his head, “I thought you could work through it on your own, and then, when you were ready, we could talk about it.”

“Like adults?” James laughed. “See, the thing is, if you had still come around, if you had treated us—me—as anything more than a mildly irritating student when you first started at Hogwarts—if you hadn’t just cut me out, maybe we could have an adult conversation. But all I see, Lupin,” still weird, but he would get used to it, “all I see is you here trying to tell me not to hate you.”

“I may have handled this badly,” Teddy conceded. “But I’m not only here because I don’t want you to hate me. I mean, I don’t, of course I don’t. But also…we _should_ talk about it. I didn’t want to push it, James. I didn’t want to push anything. If you wanted to run away,” he stopped.

“It’s not running away.” James crossed his arms. “It’s for my career. Besides, if you weren’t going to say anything, what’re you even doing here? If you were going to let me hate you, why’d you change your mind?”

Teddy rubbed a hand over his face. “Lily,” he answered.

James had not expected that.

The timer went off, a wheezing rendition of the Chudley Cannons’ fight song. James turned and opened the oven, reaching for a potholder and lifting the pizza out without saying anything. He set the pizza on the stove and reset the timer for it to cool enough to eat, then leaned forward on the counter and pressed his forehead against the door of a hanging cabinet.

“James.” Teddy’s voice was hesitant.

“Lily fucking lied,” James said. “She saw it, when Albus undid her bracelet.”

“Yeah,” Teddy confirmed. “She did.”

“And, what? She didn’t think she ought to tell me? She didn’t…?” he broke off, squeezing his eyes shut. “Shit. This is really fucked up. I thought maybe it wasn’t…I thought maybe I was wrong. But I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

He turned to face Teddy, who was playing with his bracelet, sliding it around his wrist.

“I know,” Teddy said. “It’s not—Lily told me she couldn’t—well, you get that. She shouldn’t know, yet, she’s too young and it’s—all very weird. You know.”

“Yeah.” James crossed his arms tight, to resist mimicking Teddy. “Yeah, I know.”

“So, Lily came to me and told me I couldn’t let you go through this alone.” Teddy dropped his hands to the table. “She wanted me to go to you on your birthday but I—I still don’t think it’s right, to force the issue. I still don’t know if I should be here.”

“Because fate’s fucked up?”

“Well, it’s doing its best to make fuck-ups of us.”

James nodded. “Do you know what we do?”

“I guess we have options,” Teddy said. “I don’t know which is ideal.”

“None of them, probably.”

The timer went off again, and James pulled a pizza cutter from the drawer beside the stove and sliced pieces for himself and Teddy. He slid them onto plates and then went to join Teddy at the table, finally sitting across from him.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong that you hid from this,” he told Teddy as he passed him his plate. “I just think maybe you could have given us a heads up.”

“Lily too? She’s only fifteen, James. This isn’t her problem yet.”

James took a bite of too much pizza and spoke around his mouthful, “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. So, do we just—leave it? Go on and be alone? People do, you know, and they’re fine.”

Teddy swallowed. “Is that what you’re doing here? Seeing if your uncle’s really fine?”

“No.” James shook his head. “No, I’m letting all my uncle’s fine-ness rub off on me. I don’t doubt he’s okay.”

“So we do that, then? You stay here with dragons,” Teddy narrowed his eyes, “which I didn’t even know you liked, and I stay at Hogwarts?”

“I don’t know. Ignoring it has worked okay for you, right?”

“It won’t last.” They both knew that when Lily turned eighteen everything would change all over again, if it didn’t all change before then.

“I can’t really think about this.” James rubbed his eyes. “Is this easy for anyone, even people with normal soulmates? Or does everyone realize how weird it is that we let some strange birthmark determine our lives?”

“We don’t have to,” Teddy pointed out, “if we don’t want to. It can just be that, you know. A weird birthmark.”

“Yeah,” James nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s what I want.”

“All right.” Teddy exhaled. “Okay.”

They finished the pizza in silence, and then Teddy washed the dishes and James dried them. They returned to the living room, where the fire had burnt down a little, but was still going enough to function for the Floo.

“So, I’ll see you?” Teddy asked.

“Yeah, of course,” James answered. “Just—Teddy.” He stopped him before he added Floo Powder to the fire. Teddy turned and looked at him. James was a few inches taller. That surprised him.

“What’re you going to do about Lily?”

“Nothing.” Teddy shrugged. “She’s—I’m waiting to see what Lily does about Lily.”

And then James smiled for the first time since Teddy appeared in his uncle’s living room. “Yeah,” he said, “that sounds right.” And he kissed Teddy, their mouths spicy with pizza sauce and peperoni, their lips not giving an inch. He kissed Teddy because he hadn’t messed up everything, and because he might never get another chance to kiss a soulmate.

It was short and close-mouthed and hard. It meant nothing more than that James thought he ought to, and nothing less than that he wanted to.

And then Teddy nodded, tossed a handful of Floo Powder into the fire, and left.

 


	3. chapter two

Getting to Romania was a logistical issue that Albus was determined to find a way around. The easiest solution would have been to commandeer Teddy’s fireplace, but he did not think he was informed enough to approach Teddy. Lily had been avoiding him for the three days since James’s birthday, and Teddy had been avoiding him basically forever. Al didn’t want to be nice if Teddy had fucked up, and he didn’t want to threaten him if he hadn’t, and so his Floo connection was, unfortunately, not a possibility at all.

It took him two days to find a solution, and when it came to him it was, as was often the case, very simple. It also had the potential to get him into serious trouble. He decided he was unconcerned about the trouble side of things, and ventured down to Professor Longbottom’s office early during his free period on Wednesday afternoon. His later class was History of Magic, and Binns still called him “Mr. Dumbledore” when he called on him, which was a moderate improvement over “Mr. Snape” and made for an easier time skiving off.

Professor Longbottom’s office was, as Al had anticipated, empty. His fireplace looked as if it hadn’t had a fire lit in it in years, and Al was very careful to only set a small one when he knelt in front of the grate. He was unsure whether any of the plants in his professor’s office were explosive.

He stole some Floo Powder from the dusty pot behind the fireplace, scattered it over the low flames, and stepped in.

No one came running when he fell out onto his uncle Charlie’s living room floor twenty minutes later, which led him to assume that he and James were still working. Or away, which was a possible he didn’t want to consider, because this had taken some effort.

He found James’s bedroom on the third door he tried, and went inside. The bed was a mess of duvet and books and there were clothes all over the floor. A small desk with one wobbly leg was shoved into a corner beneath a narrow window, and its surface was cluttered with papers full of James’s careful handwriting. James was a slob, Albus considered as he sifted through the notes on the desk, but his handwriting had won him an award for neatness in primary school, and it had not changed with time.

There was nothing interesting in the notes. Just boring stuff about dragons and shitty doodles of stick figure dragons. He fell back on James’s bed, shifted until he could pull out the book that was digging against his spine, and fell asleep.

James woke him up by falling on top of him. The weight of his body was immediately followed by a strangled scream and then, seconds later, Uncle Charlie slamming the door against the wall, wand out.

Once James rolled off of Albus and onto the floor, he was able to sit up and face his terrified uncle and irate brother.

“What the bloody _fuck_?”

Charlie still held his wand out. Albus held up his hands. “Just me, sorry, sorry. I fell asleep. Just here for a visit.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Charlie lowered his wand slowly. “You know what, never mind. I don’t want to know. I’m going to bed. Please don’t,” he shook his head, “kill each other or anything.”

James pushed himself to his feet and rubbed his knuckles down his spine. “What do you think you _doing_?” he hissed at Albus as Charlie shut the door behind him. “You’re going to be in so much trouble if anyone finds out about this.”

Al shrugged. “Not a big deal. I wanted to talk to you.”

“And a letter wouldn’t have done?” James pulled his chair from his desk and swung his leg over it, resting his arms on the back and watching as Albus resettled himself on the bed.

“It might’ve. But then it might not have and if it didn’t I wouldn’t have been able to tell. So,” Albus waved his hands at himself, “here I am. It’s fine, I just used Longbottom’s office. If I get in trouble it’ll just be cleaning the greenhouses for a few months.”

James shook his head. “I think I’m the sane one in this family.”

“That’s probable.” Albus rested his chin on his knees. “So.”

“You’re here because,” James prompted.

“Your eighteenth birthday.”

James went from pale to bright red so fast Al nearly missed the brief moment when his face was pink. His voice, however, was ice. “That’s not your business.”

“No,” Albus agreed, “I know it isn’t.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because Lily has been avoiding me and I’m undecided as to whether I’m speaking to Teddy. You could maybe enlighten me regarding that.”

James’s eyes widened almost comically. “Lily didn’t tell you.”

“No,” Al said, “I saw when we were little.”

“And you figured it out? Why would that even occur to you?”

Al nodded. “Because it occurred to Lily, and it made sense with Teddy having stopped coming round. None of us knew for sure, I don’t think, until you ran off here. But we all assumed.”

“And it doesn’t disgust you?” James’s tone was bitter.

Al blinked. “What would make you think that? You and Lily are my favorite people. I’m still not sure about Teddy, like I said, but you and Lily? I couldn’t ever be disgusted by you. Besides, it’s not like it’s your fault. I don’t really get why you’re running away, to be honest.”

“I’m not,” James protested, then rubbed a hand over his face. “It’s just easier to be here.”

“Yeah,” Al nodded, “I do get that. So, am I talking to Teddy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” James stood up and headed to the door, “I really don’t know anything right now, Al. Just—he came? But because of Lily. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I think I’m mostly okay, though.”

“Well, that’s what’s important.”

Al didn’t much mind that James rushed him to the Floo soon after that; the later he stayed the greater his chance of getting caught.

Professor Longbottom’s office was still empty when he arrived back at Hogwarts, though, and he didn’t pass anyone on his way back up to Gryffindor. He sort of wanted to pass someone. Something about the tightness of James’s face during their whole talk had made him want to hex someone.

Teddy Lupin would have made a nice target.

:::        

The problem—well, one of them—was that Lily loved Potions. It and Astronomy were the only courses she was actually good at and also, not coincidentally, the only ones she tried in. When Teddy had first become the Potions professor in her second year, she had thought about not trying. She had not wanted to do anything to impress him; from age eleven on he had not impressed her.

But Potions was too interesting, and Teddy wasn’t really worth it. And she couldn’t just stop trying after James’s eighteenth birthday. She couldn’t fail her OWLs and quit Potions. She barely even entertained the thought.

But she wanted to, was the thing, because she didn’t want to watch Teddy stride around the room, leaning over cauldrons and offering respectful advice to those who were struggling with this form of magic and measured praise to those who were better at it.

He paid a limited amount of attention to Lily, stopping by maybe one class a week to suggest a slightly different stirring technique or to commend the color of a particular potion. The comments were stilted and tense, and Lily wished he wouldn’t. She wished he’d ignore her entirely, but he was too good a professor to do that.

In the two weeks following James’s birthday, nothing happened. Teddy gave her a longer look than usual when she walked into Potions on the first Tuesday, and then everything returned to their awkward version of normal.

James had sent her a letter. It said only, _Thanks. Everything’s fine_. It didn’t have her name or his anywhere on it. It was a dismissal. She thought she took it reasonably well. She waited until she was back in the Slytherin common room to set it on fire.

And then everything was calm again. She stopped thinking about James, and she only thought about Teddy when he was passing by her, robes sweeping the dungeon floor. 

And then on the third Saturday after James’s birthday, Lily got summoned to the headmistress’s office.

Julia Ward was Irish, stern, and liked members of the Potter-Weasley clan for their own merits. Or disliked them, as was the case with a few. She liked Lily, because, as she had told Lily during one memorable detention, she stood up for both her family and her house, which was “admirable, if foolish.”

Lily had not done anything worth punishing in the few days prior to her message from the headmistress, and so headed up to her office feeling a bit nervous. Punishments were acceptable as long as she understood why she was being punished. This could have been for something that happened ages ago, in which case Lily had already planned an argument based on the statute of limitations.

But when she reached the headmistress’s office, she found her father standing in the circular room, carrying on a conversation with a few of the portraits on the walls, and the headmistress nowhere to be seen.

Dumbledore’s portrait waved when he noticed her. “Miss Potter,” he said, “a pleasure to see you again.”

Harry raised his eyebrows at Lily. “Have you spent much time here?”

“You can’t talk,” came a snide voice from over Lily’s shoulder. She recognized Phineas Nigellus without turning. She was his favorite; she wasn’t sure if she returned the affection. “The number of times you were in here, breaking things, shouting. We never got any rest when you were at school.”

Harry reddened. “There were rather extenuating circumstances.”

Lily grinned as Phineas replied, “Yes, well, your daughter is positively charming in comparison.”

Dumbledore rejoined, “Come now, Phineas, what have I told you about playing favorites?”

“I’ve been doing it for more than a century, Dumbledore. It’s never done me any harm. Which is more than I can say for you.”

Lily spoke over Dumbledore’s reply. “I thought Professor Ward wanted to see me. Did you have her call me?”

“Yes, sorry.” Harry stepped toward the door. “I wanted to take you out to lunch.”

“You could have just asked me to meet you somewhere,” Lily pointed out.

Harry rubbed his forehead. “I want to pretend, for my sanity, that you attempt to follow the rules.”

“All right, then, Dad. Where should we go?”

“The Three Broomsticks?”

“You know everyone will be all over us with cameras.” Lily shrugged. “But sure, if you want.”

“I can’t think of anywhere that wouldn’t be true,” he confessed, and Lily nodded.

“If you just want to talk, we could probably do it here.” Harry blinked at her. “If not here,” she waved at the portraits on the wall, “then I imagine Professor Longbottom or—or Professor Lupin would let us use their offices.” Or anyone else in the bloody school, she wanted to say, seeing as the wide world was obsessed with him.

“Maybe that’s a good idea. Neville probably isn’t even in his office.” Harry gestured for her to lead the way from the headmistress’s office, and Lily braced herself for the stares that would accompany them down the corridors. Despite having Potter-Weasley spawn run rampant in the Hogwarts halls for years, the sight of any of the older generation was still cause for minor uproar, Lily’s father especially.

Lily didn’t look around as they headed toward Neville’s office, and Harry walked by her side, staring straight ahead. Lily knew even he wasn’t used to this, and most of his life had been spent being the object of everyone’s attention.

Neville’s office, as Harry had anticipated, was empty. It was also unlocked, and Harry didn’t seem to have any compunction about leading the way inside.

Lily hadn’t spent much time in this office, but it remained mostly unchanged from how she remembered it, although the greenery that lined the walls had maybe a few more inches of twisting vines and blooming stems to them.

Harry didn’t sit; the two chairs were taken up by potted plants, and he seemed reluctant to move them. Lily figured that was probably wise, considering that they may have been poisonous or carnivorous, so she and her father stood facing each other in the middle of the office.

“You obviously know that I had something in mind when I came to see you,” Harry said, “but do you know what it is?”

Lily’s answering smile was narrow and close-mouthed. “You think I do.” She gripped her bracelet, Harry’s gaze dropped to it.

“I’m not sure how.” When Lily didn’t say anything, he continued, “Except, of course, you saw when Albus undid your bracelet. You just lied to us.”

“It’s not something we needed to discuss. It still isn’t.”

Harry nodded. “You and your brother are different; I know that, of course. You know about James, though? He told you?”

“I knew. I mean, I do know. So you’re here because James took it badly?”

“Partially.” Harry gripped the back of his neck. “He was upset with your mother and me for keeping it from him.”

“And you wanted to be sure I didn’t feel the same way? Well, don’t worry. We don’t ever need to talk about it again. I,” Lily held out her arms, “am totally perfect with never talking about this.”

Harry exhaled. “Yes, that’s good, that’s.” He shook his head, scuffed a shoe over the stone floor of Neville’s office. “See, Lily, I also needed to tell you that your mother doesn’t know.”

“About James?” Lily blinked, fast. “No, about me, you mean. How…?”  
“She wasn’t fully awake yet when the healers brought you to us. I put your bracelet on before your mum could see. I didn’t even look really—I don’t even know what the letters are.” Harry shook his head. “She had just been so anxious after James. I handled it poorly, I recognize that.”

“No,” Lily wrapped her arms around her stomach, “no, you handled it like…well, keep the peace, right? You made the peace,” she shrugged, “you should get to keep it.”

“But I,” Harry ran a hand through his hair, “I didn’t do right by you, or your brother, from day one.”

“It wasn’t something we needed to spend our childhoods worrying about. I don’t think you necessarily did wrong by us. Mum can know if she has to.” But she wouldn’t have to, Lily knew, because even in some crazy future where she and Teddy and James could put aside all the shitty heaviness inherent in their soulmate marks, they would never be able to share the facts of their lives with anyone. “It’s fine, Dad, really. I guess…thank you for coming here. But don’t worry about it anymore. I know, I’m all right.”

Harry looked at her without speaking for a few seconds. “I don’t know, Lily. I don’t know if it is all right, even if you are. But I also wanted to tell you that I have done some research on this. I want you to know you’re not alone, okay?”

“Of course I’m not alone, two in one family? Of course I’m not alone.”

Harry wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and she let him keep it there for a few seconds before ducking away and starting toward the door. “That’s all, then? Because I’ve got an essay to do.”

“Yeah, yes. That’s all. I should say hi to Al, do you know where he is?”

“No idea. Hugo’s got the Map this week, though, and he’ll be in the library. How about we go up and check?”

Harry grinned, but attempted to make his voice stern. “I shouldn’t know about that.”

“You gave it to us.” Lily smiled. “It’s your right.”

            :::

Teddy’s desk chair was worn leather. It was much more comfortable than Albus had expected it to be. He leaned back in it and it creaked. He kicked his feet up on Teddy’s desk, knocking over a few vials of ingredients. They stopped rolling before they hit the edges and smashed on the floor.

He ran a hand through his hair and stared up at the dark ceiling of the dungeon.

Teddy strode through the door soon after Al started doodling on one of the nearest textbooks, using his wand to direct the quill across the page. He didn’t look up as Teddy came between the tables that filled the room.

“Mr. Potter.” Teddy stood in front of his desk. Al still didn’t look up, but he did shake one foot on the surface of Teddy’s desk in acknowledgment. “What are you doing?” Teddy’s voice was cool.

Albus kicked his feet from the surface of the desk and stood. He grinned at Teddy—wide and white-teethed and manic—and walked past him without saying a thing.

Just as Al reached the door, Teddy said, “It’s not my fault, you know. You can’t blame me for this.”

Albus stopped and said, still facing away but speaking loudly enough that his voice carried, “I’m not blaming you _for_ it. I’m blaming you for what you’ve done with it.”

Teddy didn’t say anything else, but as Al was heading up from the dungeons he heard a crash behind him, like the entire contents of Teddy’s desk had ended up on the floor.

He was glad he had given up Potions.

           :::

Rose had lost a wager ages ago, the terms of which granted Lily access to Gryffindor Tower at any time. On Albus’s last night at school, Lily walked through the dark Gryffindor common room and climbed the stairs to the seventh year’s dormitory.

The curtains around Al’s bed were drawn. Lily slipped inside, sat cross-legged on Al’s feet, and cast a Silencing Charm.

He woke slowly despite her weight, blinking at her in the light of her wand, green eyes squinty and bloodshot. She thought he was probably still a little drunk; the whole inside of his bed smelled like whisky.

“Lily?” He pulled his feet from beneath her and drew his knees to his chest. “What’re you doing?”

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “When you leave tomorrow, where are you going to go?”

“You know,” he said. “I’ll go home, like you, for a little while, and then I’ll get a job probably in London and live with Rose probably and grow old and die, like we’ve been planning forever. Why?”

“I’m worried about you. You’re normal, you know? Are you going to look for him? Her?” She nodded toward his wrist.

Albus shook his head. “It’ll happen or it won’t, I’m not gonna force it. Besides, if you and James’ll be alone, then I don’t mind.”

“Sibling solidarity.” Lily shook her head. “But you don’t have to do that for us. And if we wanted to, Albus, we could, you know, not be alone?”

“You remember what Mum said back then? I know it was for your and James’s benefit, but I think about it a lot, how you don’t have to be with your soulmate. I don’t really like the idea that this means I _have_ to do something.” He slid his finger beneath the bracelet and scratched.

“Just James’s.” Lily inched forward so her knees were against Al’s.

“Huh?” Albus squinted at her.

“Not my benefit, just James’s. Mum doesn’t know about me.”

“How could she not?”

“Dad hid it from her. He didn’t want to worry her. He told me, after James, you know.”

Albus pressed his forehead against Lily’s. “You shouldn’t have to hide, it shouldn’t be fucking shameful.”

Lily pushed his head away. “Your breath is foul.” He stuck his tongue out, but rested his hand on her knee instead. “And it is shameful, though, you know? Even if we—I don’t know, Al, how it would all work out. But if it did, well, we couldn’t tell anyone. You’d know, and that’s probably it.”

“People love you, Lil. All of you. You wouldn’t be—we wouldn’t—I’m a little jealous, if you want to know. It’s fate, right? A miracle, you all fit together like that. Most of us are such tossers that fate says there’s only one person in the world for us, and that person might not even fit us by the time we grow up.”

Lily laughed. “Albus, you’re ridiculous. You’re so bloody out of it.”

“Well, who knows. Maybe you’re the lucky ones.” He stretched back, linked his hands behind his head. “In one way, at least.” Lily crawled up to sit beside him, her back against the headboard, and rested her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” he told her. “But I know I’ll do something and I know I’ll have people—and whether I’m fucking any of them or I’m in love with any of them or I’m sleeping in a bed with you like we did when you were little and had nightmares—well, you know? It’s life, it keeps going. I’m not complaining about any of it.”

Lily dug her elbow into his side. “Don’t ever forget what a gem you are.”

“A fucking diamond,” Albus sunk down into his pillows, “now shut off that light. It’s late and tomorrow is the last time I get to eat breakfast in the Great Hall. I don’t want to miss it.”

Lily fell asleep before he did.

:::

Albus and Rose wound up taking on a lease early that summer. Al spent barely a week at home before moving out, and Lily lasted only a week longer before appearing in his and Rose’s living room one evening, bag tight in her hand.

“I’m staying on your couch,” she told them.

“Whatever,” Al said.

“Sure.” Rose tossed her a can of Strongbow. “That’s fine.”

“It was just too quiet there.” She sat between them on the floor, where they had set cards out in what looked to have been a boring game of War. “Out in the middle of nowhere with Mum and Dad at work and no one around.”

“It’s fine.” Al poked her knee. “You just pay us a tiny bit of rent.”

Rose scooped the cards up and began shuffling them. “Just a little,” she said, and she was smiling wide when Lily looked at her.

:::

Lucy got Lily a job waiting tables at a restaurant her best friend owned, and Lily spent her first few weeks of summer learning to balance plates in one hand, to not take people’s insensitive comments seriously, and to avoid pulling her wand out while working, because sometimes unwitting Muggles wandered in, and cleaning up a few broken dishes by hand was better than receiving owls from the Ministry.

By the third week, Lily had gotten bored of sitting out behind the restaurant during her breaks and wandered into one of London’s libraries a few blocks down. She searched their computer system for books regarding the soulmate mark. They had shelves and shelves devoted to the topic, many times the books kept in the Hogwarts library.  

Lily had learned in Muggle Studies that Muggles, too, covered their marks at birth, replacing their bracelets every time they began to outgrow them. Their law also allowed for removal of the bracelets at eighteen. Even after hours spent reading Muggle books, however, Lily couldn’t understand how they rationalized the marks as non-magical. They _did_ rationalize them, of course, but their explanations had just as many holes in them as magical reasoning did.

But Muggles were more forthcoming in other areas, so Lily bought a notebook and a box of ballpoint pens and returned to the library. She spent all the mornings she wasn’t serving breakfast holed up in a corner, reading book after book on the topic of soulmate marks.

There were different theories. New Age research suggested something akin to the soulmate idea that made up the wizarding world’s explanation, but Muggle scientists claimed that a person’s mark indicated their biologic partner, i.e. with whom they’d raise the strongest children. It all went back to genetics, and Lily found herself cross-referencing the books on what Muggles called “ideal matches” (what she still considered soulmates) with biology books two floors down.

She built forts out of the books daily, and at the back of each of them she found at least one chapter detailing what Muggle scientists termed “Abnormal Marking.” And there were photographs—bland, non-moving ones—of forearms marked the way Lily’s and James’s and Teddy’s were, with two sets of initials, or, in some cases, three. There were also photographs of people with no markings, and descriptions of people who had met their matches and found them in some way incompatible.

These chapters were fascinating. They treated what Lily and James and Teddy had as something abnormal, yes, but also not unheard of, unlike the easily accessed textbooks in the Hogwarts library. And some of these books included narratives from people who had lived with their multiple soulmates and those narratives were not disheartening. Throughout the summer, Lily curated a small collection of pages torn from some of the better books, tucked in the inside pocket of her purse.

After the textbooks grew repetitive Lily took her searches to the banks of computers on the top floor. They were the slowest ones in the library, heavy things she remembered from her years in grammar school, and therefore mostly abandoned.

She searched the Internet, surreptitiously at first, and then with more abandon, for anything regarding her situation. And she found some forums and discussions that dealt with multiple soulmates. The people writing on them tended to be of a more romantic mindset and Lily read their stories with interest. Some of them were encouraging; others were decidedly not.

By the end of the summer she wasn’t hopeful, exactly, but she wasn’t as certain that she or James or Teddy was doomed.

:::

James had not thought much about dragons before moving to Romania. He had sometimes begged his dad for stories about them when he was little, and he had always listened with interest when Hagrid went on about them.  But he had never considered dragons as they related to himself.

He had not thought Romania all the way through, of course he hadn’t, but if he had thought about it, he wouldn’t have expected to feel anything for the dragons other than slight fear and a general interest, because who isn’t interested in dragons, at least in the abstract sense? But after just a few weeks, he was surprised to find that he loved them. A lot. After a few months, he found it hard to picture his life without dragons in it.

Much of his job involved flying around the reserve, monitoring the dragons and making sure that they were functioning well in their environment. It was fun. It was amazing and ridiculous and not at all what he had planned for himself. Tyler, one of the medics on staff, had started talking to him about learning to treat injured dragons, and they had a date set to begin nightly lessons, along with a couple of the other newer staff members, including James’s friend Gwen and her reticent husband Peter. 

One of the best merits of the job, aside from its inherent interest, was that it was also distracting. That is what he had had wanted when he decided, standing in his parents’ kitchen, to flee to Romania. He didn’t have time to think about anything aside from flight velocity and flame trajectory and gestation periods until well after dark, and most nights he fell into bed exhausted, ready to sleep long before his head hit the pillow.

But after several months, once everything was no longer exhilarating and new, was just exciting and sometimes not even that, some days he didn’t see any dragons at all, if the infirmary was empty and it was raining, he found himself thinking more and more about his family.

He missed them. He had left rashly, he knew that. He had left with reason, yes, but it had been unplanned. He had not said any goodbyes. He missed Lucy and Albus and his parents, Rose and Moll and Louis. He missed Lily, although he tried not to think about her, and so only ended up thinking about her while lying awake at night, unable to sleep, the edges of memories catching him in the gut.

He wanted to see her, but he was also afraid of what they could say to each other. What could he say, he wondered. More importantly—because he did plan out several possible interactions for them, and managed to keep them ordinary on his end—what would she say? She was a livewire, explosive, unpredictable.

But he still missed her. No number of dragons could fill the lack of Lily.

His uncle was good to him; he didn’t ask questions. He went out with his friends, and let James find his own place with Gwen and Peter and the rest. They lived well together; James started paying a nominal rent, and everything seemed perfectly normal.

Which was terrifying. He was only eighteen and a half, he shouldn’t have felt settled yet. But it was easy to be there, easy to let things stay the way they were. He didn’t think about leaving, about changing a thing. He missed his family, but it was bearable until nighttime, at which point he sometimes took sleeping draughts.

The end of August rolled in hot and sticky. The dragons hated it; they sent up frustrated jets of fire at noon, the heat surrounding their scales resulting in too much heat inside their chests. Unable to avoid the frequent breaths of dragon fire, the staff stayed out of the air until the late evening and early mornings, and so James was inside his uncle’s house at noon on a Thursday when his grate—which had sat empty for several long hot months—burst into flame.

“Fucking—.” James pressed himself back into the cushions of the couch.

And then a familiar figure stepped out of the fireplace, straightened her top, and fixed him with a bright-eyed stare. “James,” she smiled, stuck her wand behind her back to extinguish the flames, continued, “I thought I might have to send up flares to get your attention.”

“Well,” he coughed, “well,” he stood from the couch, “I mean, you sort of did. With the fire, and all.”

“I guess.” She shrugged. “So, hello.” She stepped forward. James joined her in front of the fireplace. He didn’t invite a hug. She wrapped her arms around her stomach.

“Hi, Lil.”

“James.” She looked around. “I haven’t been here in ages. It doesn’t look like much has changed.”

“No,” he agreed, “not much.” And then, as she continued staring at him, he added, “I mean, I live here now. It’s much messier than Uncle Charlie likes it. I try, but…you know. Plus, there’s my room. I’ve changed that. But, yeah, I mean, I guess not much has changed.”

“It’s hot though. I’ve never been here in the summer.” She turned and walked through the doorway into the kitchen. She leaned to look at the photographs on the fridge. There weren’t many, Charlie wasn’t exactly a keen decorator. There was a photo of him and his friends, and a new one of James and Gwen and Peter, each holding a dragon egg. Lily was still smiling when she looked over her shoulder at him. “You like it here, don’t you?”

“I didn’t expect to,” he confessed. “But, yeah, I guess I ended up liking it here. The dragons are fun.”

“And they look nice.” She tapped her finger against the photo, and Gwen’s image waved so hard her dreads swayed. Lily turned and leaned her back against the fridge. “Plus, there’s Uncle Charlie. He’s always been my favorite.”

“I know. He’s great.”

“If I had been born first, I might have run away here.”

James was beyond protesting that he had not run away. But he hadn’t stayed in Romania because of the soulmate marks. “Sorry I stole your chance?”

“You should be.” Lily pressed the flat of one hand against the fridge. He looked at the bracelet around her wrist. Two years, he thought, and stopped himself before he went further. “Everyone else is in boring places. I could run off to Gabrielle’s, I guess. Think she’d take me in?”

“You don’t have to run anywhere,” James pointed out. “Me and Teddy took care of that.” His voice faltered a little. She narrowed her eyes.

“You didn’t _have to_ run, either.”

“Yeah.” James rapped his knuckles on the kitchen counter. “Yeah, but I sort of did. I wasn’t expecting it. I didn’t even know it was a possibility. So, I ran. And…I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t fair to you, maybe not to Teddy, but I needed it.”

Lily looked around the kitchen. “And you like it here. You don’t want to come home?”

James took a breath. It wasn’t fair, it wouldn’t be fair, none of this was, but he didn’t want to make it worse. “I miss you,” he said. “I do, I can’t—won’t lie about that. But I am happy here. I like the work, I like the people. It’s like I said. And,” he stepped toward her, caught her wrist in one hand, pressing around her bracelet, “it’s simpler. It’s maybe not completely honest, me being here. It maybe didn’t happen in the right way. But I don’t wish it were different. I spend barely any time wishing it were different.” James let go.

Lily shrugged. “So you’re staying.”

“For now, I am. Anyway, what would I do if I came home?”

Lily shook her head, twice, back and forth, back and forth. “I don’t know.” She laughed. “I came here wanting to talk you into coming home, but I have no idea what there is for you there. You’re right.” She rubbed at her shoulder, bare and freckled. “I guess a part of me was hoping that you’d be miserable when I found you. But you’re not, and I can’t be sad over that, really, can I?”

“It wouldn’t be very nice of you to be sad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you were.”  
Lily smiled. “Because I’m not very nice? No, don’t.” Because he looked about to answer her. “Look, I had a terrible Floo over here. Can you show me around? I promise I’ll leave by tonight. School starts tomorrow, anyway. I just wanted to come and see you. We all miss you.”

“Yeah, of course I’ll show you around.”

He led her from the house, down the dirt road that connected the homes within the gates of the reserve. Lily looked around as they walked. No one was out; people were in the labs or infirmary, or taking afternoon naps, as James had been before Lily arrived.

“I’d forgotten how rustic it all is.” James opened his mouth to protest, but she continued, “I don’t mean that as an insult, I really don’t. It’s charming, and not in a condescending way, either.”

James laughed. “All right, I get it. You don’t know how to compliment the middle of nowhere. We have to be out here, though, you know. Dragons can’t exactly live in the middle of London.”

“Well, they can. Gringotts is in the middle of London.”

“And that dragon doesn’t live there anymore, does it?”

“It would if Dad and Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron hadn’t needed a quick escape.”

“It was a liberation technique,” James protested.

“Bullshit, it was convenient. You know how Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron feel about dragons. And Dad, too, when he’s not talking to Hagrid.”

“Very rude.” James elbowed her, and she elbowed him back. He wanted, suddenly, to catch her hand in his and hang on tight. He stuck his in the pocket of his shorts instead. “And don’t say stuff like that around here. They all like Dad because of that escape.”

“And not for other reasons? There are other reasons.”

“Yeah,” James agreed. “Of course.”

“Are you still mad at him?” Lily stepped off the dirt path beyond the group of houses, and James followed her into the ankle-high grass. “And Mum?”

“Not really.” James looked at his feet. “I mean, I know why they didn’t tell me.”

“Were you ever mad at me?” Her voice went soft. He didn’t look up.

“Not really,” he repeated. “A little, I guess,” he corrected, “when Teddy came to see me. I guess I was mad at you then. But I got over it. You were young. You _are_ young.”

“Teddy keeps saying that, too.”

James tried not to feel jealous of that. He had left; they still saw each other. At least if Teddy was calling her young too—because she _was_ —then he wasn’t doing anything that would make James angry with him. “Well,” he shrugged, “he’s not wrong.”

“I know,” Lily said. “But soon he will be. And what then?”

“We deal with it when we get to it.”

Lily tugged on the few strands of hair that had fallen loose from her bun. “What do you mean by ‘deal with it’?”

James sighed. “What can I mean, Lil? What options do we have?”

“I don’t know. I’ve done some research this summer, and it doesn’t seem like we’re totally limited. I mean, it’s not entirely impossible.”

James jerked his head up and stared at her. Her shoulders were back and she was staring at him, teeth on her lower lip and gaze defiant. “You can’t mean that, Lily. That’s not possible.”  
“It could be, that’s what I’m saying.”

“No. We’re not…let’s not talk about it, all right? Especially not now.”  
Lily didn’t say anything for a couple of long seconds, and then she shrugged, throwing her shoulders up near her ears. “Yeah, okay. Whatever.” She brushed past him and started walking back toward his house.

“Lil.” James hurried after her. “Please don’t be angry. I’m just trying to keep this as normal as possible.”   

“I know,” Lily muttered. He reached for her, but she dropped her shoulder and turned on her heel to face him. He let his hand fall to his side. “I know, James. It’s fine, really. I shouldn’t have even—I just wanted to see you, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.” She grinned, a too-wide grin that made her look crazy. “Hell, I shouldn’t even know, right?”

“We shouldn’t have looked.”

“Maybe not, but I’m glad I’ve had time to prepare.”

“Prepare for what, though?” he asked. They started back toward Charlie’s at a slower pace, and she seemed less angry.

“You know, so I don’t go off at Dad and Mum—who, by the way, doesn’t even know about me.”

James stumbled over a stone in the road and then continued walking for a few steps before asking, “Mum doesn’t know?”       

“Dad told me he hid it from her.” Lily glanced at him. “I told him it’s fine. And it is, really. Why should anyone need to know? It’s a personal thing, biology or fate or whatever.” She shook her head. “Sorry, I said I was done talking about this. Do you know when Uncle Charlie will be getting back?”

“He might be in now.” James could see his house from where they were. “Lily, will you tell me—is everything okay between us?”

“Yeah,” she said, voice bright and face turned away from him, so he couldn’t see if she was faking it, “why wouldn’t it be? I’m glad you’re all right. I’m all right. Everything’s fine, it’s all normal.”  
He thought she sounded too cheerful, but he didn’t want to risk it.

Charlie was in the kitchen, and he turned when they came in, grinning wide when he saw Lily.

“Are you here for the dragons too?” he asked, and Lily laughed.

“Give me another couple of years, and maybe I will be.”

Charlie asked her about normal things, about school and work, and James learned that she had lived in London that summer, realized abruptly that she had had experiences he had had no part in whatsoever. He hadn’t even thought to ask her.

He reminded himself that this was what he had chosen, that being left out of Lily’s everyday existence was one of the many prices he had to pay for living in Romania. For living with _dragons_ , which he wanted fiercely to outweigh everything else.

Lily eventually whirled away via the fireplace. James sat on the couch and stared at his feet. Charlie appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, watching him.

After a moment he spoke. “I don’t have a soulmate mark, but my parents put the bracelet on me anyway. I think they didn’t want me to grow up different. They also hoped that I would develop one with time, that somehow fate would right its mistake. They told me before I turned eighteen, though. They thought it would be cruel for me to find out on my own.” He turned into the kitchen. James stood and followed to find his uncle undoing the caps on two bottles of beer.  He passed one to James. “Your parents didn’t warn you.”  
“I have a mark.”

“Yeah. But it’s not the same as everyone else’s, right?” Charlie took a mouthful of beer. “Look,” he said, “I’m not prying and I’m not going to. You don’t have to tell me; in fact, I think I’d rather you didn’t. But I didn’t let my lack of a mark decide my life. I’ve had relationships, long-term ones. I’ve met other people like me and, I imagine, people like you. There are options, you know? That’s all I’m saying.” He rested the rim of the bottle against his lips. “And now we never have to talk about this again, unless you want to.”

James looked into the narrow mouth of the bottle. “Thanks,” he said. “Really,” he added, because he thought he sounded disingenuous. “I really do appreciate it—all of this.”

“It’s been nice having you here, whatever your reasons.” Charlie squeezed his shoulder and headed back into the living room. James took a few mouthfuls of beer before following him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deciding to post this right at the start of a new job was probably not the wisest decision I've ever made. Hope you enjoyed this chapter despite its lateness and possible slowness(?).


	4. chapter three

Lily had to make a concentrated effort to change. It would have been easy to return to Hogwarts and continue like usual. But she was bored, and her future looked like it would be more of the same, and she was unwilling to go on in a straight line. She refused to let James and Teddy’s inaction dictate her life.

The only person she owed anything to was herself. And what she wanted was not what she had always had.

First weekend back, Gryffindor and Slytherin threw a joint party. Gryffindor provided the drinks and food, and Slytherin provided the dungeons. Ris organized and enchanted the invitations; no one below fifth year was allowed, and a few of the fifth, sixth, and seventh years were provided distractions for the evening so they didn’t ruin everything by telling a professor.

Hugo and Lorcan Scamander charmed the walls of the Slytherin common room with noise-cancelling spells, and Hugo lent Lily his tampered-with computer, full of really fantastic Muggle pop music.  Lily and Regina spent a few evenings creating an hours-long playlist, and then Lysander Scamander set a few noise-increasing spells on the computer’s speakers. Saturday night, the common room was shaking with music so loud no one could hear anything themselves or anyone else said.

The computer took care of the music and everyone got terribly drunk. The whole room was hot with sweat and summer and the warring smells of harsh whiskey and sweet chasers and the flat humid scent of bad beer.

Everyone was in the center of the room, which had been repurposed as a dance floor, and it was so crowded that dancing alone was impossible. Lily had Sebastian Nott’s hands on her waist and Eliot Thomas in front of her. She twisted in Sebastian’s hands and kissed him, her mouth and his wet.

He pulled her through the crowd, his fingers sliding through the belt loops of her jeans and guiding her hips against his. They stumbled, drunk and locked together, into their classmates, and Lily didn’t mind a bit when she tumbled over the arm of a couch pushed against the wall. Seb caught himself from falling onto her, their faces a few inches apart, both of them laughing.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” he said.

“It’s not a problem, though?”  
“No.” He kissed her again. “No, I rather like it.”

They woke up the next morning in Sebastian’s bed, both still mostly dressed and very hungover.

Lily pressed her forehead into his pillows. “I feel like shit.”

“Yeah.” He touched her shoulder. “Lil, last night.”

“I’m too hungover.” She pulled a pillow over her head. “We’re not talking about it.”

“I think we should.” He slid his face beneath the pillow too, lying on his side and facing her. She patted his ear. “Just what it meant.”

“Nothing, right?” She tugged on his earlobe. “Just friends, right?”

“But, like. Could that happen again? Or something like it?”

“Why not? It was fun, nothing’s stopping us.”

“Right.” Sebastian shut his eyes. “Good. Wake me when your head stops hurting.”

They stayed in bed for a very long time.

:::

One Tuesday in the middle of October, Sebastian grabbed Lily from the corridor outside of Potions. “Come on.”

She followed without question. He didn’t take her far; a few doors down from the Potions dungeon there was a broom closet, and he unlocked the door and slipped inside with a couple of quick glances over his shoulder.

Lily let the door fall shut behind her.

He kissed her back against the wall, a broom handle dropping against her shoulder and a pail rolling against Seb’s feet, from the sound of it, but she didn’t care. She kissed him, her hands tugging his shirt up from his trousers, lingering over the hard feel of his hips just above his belt and the soft skin of his stomach as his hands mirrored hers beneath her shirt.

“Lily,” he mumbled, “Lily Lily Lily, what if I told you,” but she bit at his lip—gently, just enough to shut him up.  
She leaned back and tugged at his belt buckle with distracted fingers, and it was just then, with Sebastian’s mouth on hers and her hands on his belt, that the closet filled with light.

“Fuck.” Sebastian pressed into her, and Lily looked over his shoulder to see Teddy standing in the hallway, staring at them.

He stepped back. “Oh,” he said, “okay.”

“Professor.” Sebastian craned his neck, blocking Lily’s view. “Would you mind shutting the door?”

It slammed shut.

“Well.” Lily redid Sebastian’s belt, tucked her own shirt back into her skirt. “That was.”

“A little awkward.” He stepped away from her, pulling his wand from his back pocket and casting a Lumos Charm. He looked halfway to wrecked; Lily assumed she looked the same.

“No way I’m going to be able to convince him I was sick.” She conjured a mirror and began tucking her hair back into a braid.

“Are you going to class?” Seb stared down at her. “Really? Why not just come back to Slytherin?”  
Lily shrugged. “To make a point.” She threw out her arms as much as she was able. “How do I look?”

“Like we nearly fucked in a broom closet.” He opened the door, expression intent with ironic chivalry. “But go to class if you want to.”

She did. She brewed the day’s potion—a version of a confusion draught—perfectly and ignored Ris’s persistent kicks at her ankle beneath the table, the few whispered comments between the tables nearer the front of the class, and Teddy’s refusal to look at her.

When she brought her stoppered flask to his desk his hair flashed dark for a moment before balancing out to its usual brown.

She left without saying anything.

Ris grabbed onto her wrist as soon as they were out of the classroom. “He went to find who was making all that noise in the hall—what were you doing, throwing brooms around?—and came back in looking as if he’d just walked in on his parents or something, he was that shocked. His expression,” she trailed off gleefully.

“He looked _livid_ ,” was Isobel Longbottom’s interpretation. “Like, so upset, Lil.”

“It’s fine. He’ll get over it.”

“He’s so weird about you, though.” Izzie kept pace with Lily and Ris as they headed up to the Great Hall for lunch. “Like you’re his sister but also not quite like that?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, but he was so angry.”

“I was also skipping class. I’m sure he didn’t appreciate that.” Lily tugged her hair out of its braid and ran her fingers through it. “Whatever, it’s fine. He’ll get over it.”

“Well, at least he can’t fail you.” Izzie turned toward the Gryffindor table as they reached the Great Hall. “Everyone knows you’re the best in our year.”

Lily hadn’t even thought of that as a possibility. If Teddy had been one to take out personal feelings in the classroom, she was pretty sure she would have failed the year before.

:::

He tried not to think about it. It wasn’t as if he expected Lily to not experience things. He told himself that, repeatedly, as he cleaned up from the sixth year’s lesson and graded their potions and returned to his quarters for a much needed cup of coffee. It wasn’t as if he had any plans for their future.

But a part of him, he thought, may have been waiting on Lily to make her move. And now she had; early, yeah, but it was clear. _She_ wasn’t waiting.

He wondered if James was. He hadn’t spoken to him since he’d gone to Romania.

Once Lily left Hogwarts, he’d be like that with her, too. Silence from all directions, going in all directions.

He undid his bracelet and looked at the letters on his wrist, and then retied it. They hadn’t changed, of course. They wouldn’t.

That weekend he went to Diagon Alley. He met a girl in a pub, and went back to her flat, and kissed her until her infrequent words were barely English. She kissed him back, and it wasn’t bad—it was decidedly not bad, the whole thing.

When they were lying in her bed, both of them on their backs and staring at her ceiling, her hand found his bracelet on his wrist. She played with it, twisting it around.

“You’re definitely over eighteen,” she said, but her voice, so calm moments before, carried a tense edge.

“I’m twenty-six.”

“Oh thank God.” She slid her finger beneath his bracelet. He pulled away. “Why’re you still wearing that, then?”

“It’s distracting,” he said. “Don’t you get distracted?” He’d noticed that her soulmate mark— _TR_ —had an arrow beside it, shifting by occasional centimeters.

“Hmm,” she lifted her wrist above her head so they could both see it. The arrow stopped moving. “I got used to it. We know each other.”

“How does that work, then?”

“Well, neither of us wants to settle down yet. We’re just hanging around until we do. How about you?”

He shrugged his shoulders back into her too soft pillows. “It’s a non-issue.”

“What does that mean?” She reached for his arm again, tried to lift it between them. He pressed down.

“I’m never going to,” he should have thought this through before going home with her, “I don’t know. My soulmate, or whatever, we’re never going to have anything.”

“How can you know that?” She rolled over on her side and tried to get a better look at him in the dim light from her bedside lamp. “You’re gorgeous, I bet they’re lovely, whoever it is—what’s the problem?”

“We don’t work.”

“That’s bullshit, isn’t it? You’re made for each other.”

“Is what you’re doing bullshit, too, then? You don’t want to settle down so you fuck other people until you do? What’s the point, if you know you’ve got that _one perfect person_?” His voice sat on the edge of a sneer. He rolled to sit up. She caught his wrist again.

“Hey,” she tried, voice softer.

“No, look, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. It’s just,” he touched the bracelet, “this is a sore subject.”

She looked up at him. “Okay, I get it. It’s off limits. Stay, anyway. Stay tonight.”

He shook his head and swung his legs over the edge of her bed, catching at his boxers with his foot and pulling them on. “I’m sorry, I should get going.”

“Will I see you again?” she asked, watching as he dressed. He looked back at her as he pocketed his wand. She had blond hair and these stunning eyes and a bit of a self-satisfied look to her mouth, which was not at all unattractive.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

:::

James was sitting at a bar, drinking something that was entirely too fruity to go by the name Dragon Fire, and contemplating slipping out while Peter and Gwen were arguing over songs by the old fashioned jukebox. They hadn’t really been paying attention to him for the last half hour, anyway, he didn’t think they’d notice if he left.

He had just dropped one foot to the ground when someone set an identical drink beside his on the surface of the bar.

“So, Dragon Fire? Little disgusting, huh?”

James glanced over. The guy was blonde, although his hair looked almost green in the light of the bar, and thin. He had a sharp nose and was not wearing a bracelet, but James couldn’t see the inside of his wrist.

“Very disgusting,” James agreed. He returned his foot to the rung of the barstool. “Actual dragon fire definitely smells better than this stuff.”

For a moment the man’s expression registered as surprise, and James worried that he was a Muggle who had somehow found his way into the village’s only wizarding pub. But then the man nodded and said, “You’re up at the reserve, then?” and James nodded, breathing normally again. “My cousin used to work there,” the man continued, “he’s why I moved here. Darren,” he reached out a hand to shake James’s, and when it was extended between them James was able to make out the initials—two pairs of letters, two steady black arrows—on the man’s wrist.

“James.” He stuttered a little over his name. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Darren grinned at him. “Never seen something like this before?” He tapped at his own wrist.

“No,” James said, “no, I have. It just surprised me that you don’t cover it up.”

And then Darren’s gaze darted to James’s own wrist and the bracelet there, and he dipped his chin. “I did for a while, but then I thought, who the fuck cared, you know? Two people out there love me, and I love two people—theoretically, of course, I’ve never met either of them.”

“You haven’t?” James took an overly large gulp of his drink and held in a sputter. “Why not?”

“A little scary, you know, to go up to two complete strangers and suggest polyamory. It scared me too much when I was younger, and judging from the fact that they’re both on other sides of the world,” the arrows were pointing in opposite directions, “well, it apparently scared them too much too. I figure they’ve probably settled down by now. I’m twenty-seven, they’ve got to be at least that, so,” he shrugged, “it’s not a bad life, this one.”

“What do you do?”

He smiled. “I hang around. Work in a restaurant. I see who I want to. I don’t think about fate too much.”

“If you had known them,” James asked him later, when they were walking down the darkened street through town, “would you have considered it?”

“Depends, I guess, on whether I liked them. If I liked them? Yeah, definitely. It’s a weird sort of gift, I think, to have two people you could love like that.”

“That’s,” James looked up at the stars, and then glanced at the man walking beside him before returning his gaze to the street ahead, “not exactly how I would look at it.”

“No,” Darren wrapped an arm around James’s shoulders; James let it stay, “I rather got the impression it wasn’t. But you’ve still got time to think about it, don’t you? And,” his voice got lower, “nobody said you had to stay still to think about anything.”

“They didn’t?”

“No. Just keep moving. Things will work out.”

:::

It took Teddy a long time to look at Lily again. It had scared him, the sight of her with Sebastian Nott. He was willing to admit that. But it had also shifted his perspective of what they were doing. They weren’t waiting, he had to keep reminding himself. They’d all decided there was nothing to wait for—they’d _all_ decided it, but him first—and so he had no reason to be upset with her. But it was still a little weird to see her at the back of his class, and to think about her and Sebastian in that broom closet. Very weird. Much too weird, at first.

He did get over it eventually, because he had to, and because his class seemed to be placing bets. Every time he got closer to approaching Lily’s table, he noticed that one or another of the students would inch nearer to whoever was sitting beside them. Like they had been gossiping about him. Which was intolerable, even if they hadn’t arrived at the real reason for his reaction that day—which no one could have, or it would have been all over one of the papers.

The day he finally did approach Lily’s table and say, “Very nice, Miss Potter,” Ris squealed. Full on squealed. He turned on his heel and raised his eyebrows at where she was sitting at the table in front of Lily’s, but she wasn’t paying attention. She was leaning over and fishing in Isobel’s bag.

“Miss Parkinson?”

“Sorry,” she emerged with a purse held in her fist. It jangled when she shook it. “Just, I picked today, so I wanted to claim my earnings before Izzie could conveniently lose them.”

Teddy turned back to look at Lily. Her face was bright red, but she met his gaze. “Everyone’s so bored they had to make a bet about us, Professor. Maybe you should think up a new potion to keep us entertained.”

Teddy should have punished her for that, but he just shook his head and returned to the front of the class.

It wasn’t normal, really, but things hadn’t been normal between them in a very long time.

He supposed it was better.

:::

There was an event at the start of summer at the Wizarding History Museum off the Ministry; Audrey was resplendent, excited and glowing with the success of her venture, her efforts to revitalize the museum, which had been neglected since well before the First Wizarding War.

Lucy had written to beg James to come home for it. _Everyone_ , she told him in a letter written and rewritten around the beginning of March, _will be there. You can’t miss it, everyone will be so sad_. James hadn’t spoken to her much since he had gone to Romania, but she hoped he would at least come home for this.

James had written back in the middle of May, telling her that of course he would come. The letter was hasty and uninformative, but she accepted it as a general sort of effort.

:::

Lily invited Sebastian to go to the gala with her.

“I’ll be there anyway, Lil,” he pointed out, tugging a shirt over his messy hair. “My father donated a lot of money to your aunt’s fund.”

“Yeah, but you should go with me.” She kicked him in the thigh with a bare foot and he turned to look at her, eyebrows raised.

“You’re trying to make someone jealous,” he guessed.

“No.” Lily rolled over in his bed. They were in his flat in London, which he had moved into immediately after leaving Hogwarts in June. It was tiny but beautiful and well-designed, and his bed was the softest thing since…well, anything. Lily hated leaving it. “I’m not trying to make anyone jealous. But here’s what I’m thinking,” Sebastian started moving toward the door and she raised her voice, “it’ll get you exposure if you’re seen with me, which you want, don’t even play like you don’t; it’ll tell people that I am off limits, which will make things easier for me in the future; and it’ll get the tabloids off my back about who I’m seeing since obviously I’m seeing you. It’s a multi-win situation. Plus, it’ll be fun.”

He shook his head. “Why do you want to be seen as off limits? Last I heard you were having a lot of fun being not-off-limits every weekend.”

Lily lifted her head from his pillows and stared at him. He looked a little red around the ears. “Are _you_ jealous?”

“No.” He bit the word out.

“Oh, Seb. No.” Lily fell out of bed. “You know we’re not, like, made for each other,” she reached for his wrist, the mark there he’d covered minutes after he’d seen it, because, he’d told her, he hadn’t wanted to run off and find his soulmate right then, “but you’re the best thing, really, you are. I wouldn’t pick anyone over you.”

“You have, though,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, I have. In a momentary sense,” she knew the words were bullshit, but she didn’t try to stop herself. “I would never want to spend more time than I have with any of those assholes. You’re the only one I _like_.”

“That’s a little sad, Lily.”

She rubbed at her nose. “Yeah, I guess. But it’s how it is. You’ll come to the Museum thing with me?”

“As long as I don’t have to fight anyone for you.”

“Pinky promise,” she held out a finger. He took it in his.

:::

“I just don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Darren said.

“Why not?” James swung his broom over his shoulder and led the way along a shaded path to a small field a mile or so away from the inhabited part of the reserve.

“There are a few things to consider.” He hurried to catch up with James. “Least of which being me meeting your family?”

“They all know about you. They like you already.”

“Yeah, okay. Sure. But do they know that we’re only dating—if that’s even what you’ve called it—for convenience? And what about your soulmates—will they be there? And what about the press? You’re well known, you can’t tell me they won’t be all over you.”

“My family’s not an issue; my soulmates are not an issue; and the press is only an issue if it’ll bother you. They’ve been all over me since I was born, it’s not a problem for me anymore.”

“Yeah, but.” He shook his head. “It just seems like a big step, James.”

“Look, you don’t have to come. I just thought it would be fun. You could also just come as a friend, that’d be fine.”

“I don’t know.”

James mounted his broom and circled over his head. “Well, just think about it, okay?”

“Sure,” Darren nodded and followed James into the sky, “I guess I’ll think about it.”

:::

Teddy wasn’t sure who he wanted to take with him to the Gala. He knew he had to bring someone, because the press, while not nearly as ruthless with him as it was with the Potters and Weasleys, was still an entity he did not feel like attracting. If he brought someone who was good with cameras and reporters, he’d feel a little better about going. If he went solo, he knew there’d be at least six articles out the next morning about the “eligible bachelor” and then at least six dozen owls at his window the next day.    

He thought about who to invite for a while. Stella was the obvious choice; she was a reporter herself, and therefore would not get into any verbal tangles. Unless she meant to, was the thing, and she had a bit of a rebellious streak. She might have caused trouble just to cause trouble.

Janice was a terrible choice; she was too chatty and too bubbly, gave too much away with every word. But she was also easy to like, and that might serve to his advantage even if she did let the whole world know that they weren’t precisely dating, just seeing each other occasionally.

He settled on Amber, eventually, because she was quiet and difficult to read, and therefore would give little away. She would hopefully come off as shy—which she sometimes was—rather than standoffish—which she wasn’t—but he knew that either way the press would be trying too hard to figure her out to verbally tear her or Teddy to pieces.

She said she didn’t want to go, at first, but he convinced her through the lure of history and free food. She also told him, in one of her rare moments of transparency, that she wanted to meet the people who had raised him.

He didn’t think about her meeting Lily. He didn’t want to think that that meeting would mean anything, and he hated the part of himself that hoped it went disastrously.

:::

Albus was not thrilled with how this whole thing was turning out. He stood beside his father and mother, just inside the door of the Museum, and looked around for his siblings. Lily, wearing a silver dress that dipped low down her back, held Nott’s hand in one of hers and a champagne flute in another; he was pretty sure he’d just seen her sneak a drink from a flask. She was leaning against a pillar by a wall of Middle Ages work depicting the black death, laughing—fake, so fake—at something Isobel Longbottom was saying. 

James and his—boyfriend? something, for sure, Albus was not buying that they were only friends—stood in another corner, talking to Hugo and Lorcan Scamander, who always slouched a little more than his brother. James kept glancing over Hugo’s shoulder at Lily, clear as glass to Albus, hopefully not as obvious to the various reporters whose flashbulbs were giving the whole hall a dim strobe light effect.

Albus’s mum touched his shoulder. “Why don’t you go see your friends?” she suggested, voice low beneath the humming mumble of an older wizard—Yuri? Quentin?—talking to his father.

Al shrugged. “Yeah, all right.” But he didn’t want to talk to Lily or James, and most of his friends were grouped around one or the other of his siblings.

By some chance—likely not a lucky one—he caught sight of Teddy in a pocket of his older cousins’ classmates, a tall brown-haired girl tucked against his side. He, wisely, was out of sight of both Lily and James, and Albus hesitated, briefly, but he did, before crossing the hall to slide beside the brown-haired girl.

“I’m Al,” he said, just in her ear, and she jumped, her shoulders jerking up and nearly catching his chin.

When she turned her head to face him, he was half expecting to be cursed into next year for frightening her, but instead was met with a small smile. “Amber,” she responded. “You’re a Potter?”

Teddy was looking over Amber’s shoulder at him, and Albus was a little worried about the expression on his face. He tried to look unassuming. “Yeah, the middle one. The others are over there. Hi Teddy.”

Teddy nodded at him.

“Ted said he knew you, just didn’t say how well. Until he invited me to this thing, when all of a sudden it was all, ‘you might end up in a few photos,’ ‘a few papers,’ ‘just the society pages,’ ‘it’s no big deal, really, come.’”

“And don’t you sound just thrilled to be here.” Albus raised his eyebrows at Teddy’s, whose scowl had grown more pronounced. “How’d he finally trick you into coming?”

“Free food,” Amber said, and laughed. Albus nodded.

“You’ve got your priorities straight. Want to go find the caterer’s headquarters? It’s always easiest to get food straight from the source.”

She glanced at Teddy, who shrugged. “I’ll be fine, go if you want.”

“You should come too,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to leave you alone with all these friends you never talk about.”

“Uncalled for.” Teddy’s face broke, his mouth easing into a smile. “It’s fine, I’m not really hungry, and Al’ll show you around better than I could. He’s basically lived here the last year.”

“All right,” she drew the words out, but Al linked his arm with his and pulled her away from him.

Once they were out of the main hall and down a side corridor down which he’d seen several of the black-robed wait-staff disappear, he asked, “So, you and Teddy? Is that a recent thing?”

She slipped her arm from his but continued to move beside him, shaking her head a couple of times. “No, I mean, not really? We’ve been seeing each other for months, but it’s not really serious or even exclusive. We’re just hanging out, really.”

Al nodded. “Do you want it to be serious?”

She laughed, sharp and short. “I don’t really know you,” she pointed out. “Why should I share this stuff with you?”

“Easy. I’m a good listener; I’m pretty impartial—believe me, I’m _definitely_ not on Teddy’s side; and I’m not going to repeat anything you tell me.”

“How can I know that?”

“You can’t, but I am trustworthy.”

She stopped and stepped back to lean against one of the marble walls. Al stopped and faced her, standing a few feet away.

“The thing is,” she said, voice quiet, “I really do want to talk to someone about this. My friends are all so bitchy about him—like, he’s just using me, or whatever, so they don’t think they can be open-minded about him. But I’m also using him? So I don’t think their opinions actually help at all.”

“Okay, so? More or less unbiased-ish here.”

“So I don’t really want it to be serious. He’s obviously hung up over his soulmate; it’s pretty clear. I don’t know who it is,” she hurried, “but it’s like, well, he’s always so careful about his bracelet. Most of us, at our age, have taken it off, even if we don’t expect to find someone. I don’t want something serious with him because it could never work, and because I know that if my soulmate walked through that door I’d throw Teddy over in a minute. And it’s not as if I haven’t seen anyone else since I met him. It’s not as if he hasn’t seen anyone else. It’s not nice or simple,” she bit a red lip, “but that’s how it is.”

Albus shrugged. “That’s cool. So your arrangement works for now, and nobody gets hurt in the end.”

“Someone might get hurt. I don’t know, we’re not as clean as that. But,” she smiled, “yeah, it works for now. He gets a date to these things and I get free food. So, lead on, Potter.”

Al did.

:::

There were so many people here. James kept brushing his arm against Darren’s, unintentionally searching for comfort. This had not been a good idea.

He told Darren as much. “We shouldn’t have come.”

“You mean me or both of us?” Darren looked perfectly at home. He didn’t seem to mind the ubiquitous presence of the press, or the strange looks the two of them had been garnering since entering the Museum.

“Both of us,” James answered. “Possibly just me.”

“You’re fine.” Darren’s grin was a lie.

“I’m not.” James tugged at the sleeve of his tuxedo and reached for Darren’s champagne glass. He gave it up without a struggle.

“Who’re they,” Darren nodded his chin toward a group at the other end of the hall, where James knew, because he’d been watching all night, Lily and Sebastian Nott were holding court.

“My sister and her gang.” He tried to keep his voice impassive, but Darren caught and understood its edge.

“Yeah? Were you planning on introducing us?”

James tipped back the rest of the champagne and set it on a nearby table—which was probably something ancient and priceless, from some medieval king’s dining room, but the velvet cords around it had gotten knocked over and not replaced, so whatever—and then he took Darren’s hand and began leading him across the room. “Fair warning,” he said, “Lily is a bit of a handful.”

Darren’s gaze struck him as too knowing.

Lily’s smile was bright and false when he introduced Darren to her, and when she lifted her hand in acknowledgment, she brought Nott’s up with it, as their fingers were threaded together. “Potter,” Nott’s smile had always pissed James off.

“Nott.” James nodded. He glanced around in the silence that followed. “So, some turnout, huh? Aunt Audrey must be pleased.”

Lily raised red eyebrows at him, her lips thinned and twisted in a half-suppressed smirk. _Boring_ , she was saying, drawing the word out like she was seven years old still.

“She does seem very happy.” Nott nodded toward the front of the room, where Audrey was laughing in a group that included the Minister.

“Chuffed, even,” Lily said. “So, how’re the dragons? Do you work on the reserve, too, Darren? I haven’t heard a thing about you, I’m sorry.”

James tightened his hand on Darren’s. But Darren said, tone even, “Unsurprising. I didn’t even know he had a sister until he told me about this thing.”

James had never seen Lily’s face close off so quickly. “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

Darren released James’s hand to brush hair back from his forehead, and James saw when both Lily and Sebastian noticed the marks on his wrist. Lily’s gaze snapped to James. Sebastian said, “Fuck,” and then reddened.

Darren laughed, mouth wide open, and for a moment James considered how easy his future could be. Neither of them had to be with their soulmates; he and Darren could stay together. They could be good, he knew.

“It’s fine,” Darren told Sebastian. Lily was still staring at James. He looked at the floor. “It’s not usual.”

“But what does it mean?” Sebastian asked. Lily slid her hand from his, and he didn’t even seem to notice.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got two soulmates? Did one of them die?”

Darren shook his head, mouth a smirk. “No, you have to know these things disappear if your soulmate dies. I just have two.” He shrugged. “I’ve never met them,” he explained. “So it doesn’t really matter.”

“Do you want to?” Lily asked.

Darren glanced at James and James thought, from the way his mouth was soft and smiling, that he had definitely figured it out. “Not right now,” he told Lily. “I’ve told James before, I think I waited too long, and they haven’t found each other, so we’re all probably just as well off living our lives separately.”

“Don’t you think that’s the case for everyone like you?” Sebastian asked, and Lily, suddenly fiery and red-faced, turned on her toe to face him.

“Don’t be an ass,” she said. “Don’t you think if people are born to love two people, then they can love those two people if they want to?”

Sebastian held up his hands. “I think it would be easier if they didn’t.”

“Well, obviously.” Lily shared her glare equally among the three of them. “But who said easy is the way to go?”

“I thought you did?”

Lily shook her head. She reached out and grabbed James’s wrist, the one without the bracelet; her hand was warm over his skin, her nails dug in slightly. “Want another drink?” she asked the group at large, and continued, “good, come on, James,” before anyone could answer.

James followed her, and glanced back to see Darren lean over to Sebastian, whose face was relaxed. Darren looked relaxed, too, not at all anxious.

Not like James was. His palms were sweating, and he was relieved Lily had him by the wrist rather than the hand.

“Lily,” he said, but she kept walking.

She led him to one of the curtained corridors angling off the main room and pushed him down the hall until they reached a narrow alcove, which was probably intended to hold some marble bust or statue, but still stood empty.

She pushed him against the wall, and when her lips were an inch from his she asked, “Can I?”

James didn’t know how to say no to her.

:::

Teddy saw Lily drag James out of the room.  He gave them a few minutes, during which he made an attempt at continuing a mostly one-sided conversation with Victoire’s most recent boyfriend, and then he made his excuses and followed Lily and James down the hall.

He stopped as soon as he was past the curtain. Lily had James pressed into an alcove, was kissing him. The silver of her dress fell over the black of his tux, and his hands were on the bare skin of her back, his fingertips pressing indents over her freckles.

Teddy didn’t know what to do.

He wasn’t trespassing—he _wasn’t_ —but they hadn’t looked for him all night. He wasn’t welcome.

But then, it wasn’t as if they were in a locked room. They were in a public hall, at a party swarming with family and photographers.

So Teddy coughed.

James’s hands went from gripping Lily tightly to pushing her so fast that she stumbled, her heels slipping as he moved her away from him. Teddy caught her, one hand to her low back, and James blinked at him, his eyes wide and pupils blown black.

“Shit,” he said. Then, “Sorry, Lil.”

Lily stepped away from Teddy, her heels clicking loud over the muffled sounds of the party. She didn’t say anything to James. Her lips were a smear of red.

“I’m sorry.” Teddy dropped his hands to his side. “I shouldn’t have interrupted.”

James stared at his feet. Lily glared at him. “No,” she said, “you shouldn’t have.”  
“I wouldn’t have,” Teddy said; it may have been a lie, it may not have, he wasn’t sure, “but anyone could have walked in here. I just. That wouldn’t have been good.”

“Fuck.” James ran a hand through his hair, which was already all over the place. Teddy wanted to smooth it down, but he refused to move an inch toward either Potter.

Lily faked a laugh. “A little scandal wouldn’t hurt anyone.” Her voice was shaking, though, and Teddy didn’t buy that she wasn’t scared of being found out.

“It’d be a pain to deal with, don’t be dumb.” James dropped his head back against the wall behind him and let out a long breath. “I,” he shook his head. “Thanks, Ted.”

“Don’t mention it,” Teddy said. “Like I said, I wouldn’t have,” lie, maybe, again, “except I was worried about you being found out.”

“Like you said,” Lily repeated, tone dry.

“Also,” Teddy tried for upbeat, but thought he probably failed epically, “I thought we weren’t going to address it until Lily turned eighteen?”

“We weren’t really addressing it, were we?” Lily’s voice had an edge to it. “And I wasn’t involved in that agreement.”

“Because you were out of it,” James muttered. “Or you were supposed to be. What the hell, Lily?”

And then she was storming him, pressed against him like she had been when Teddy walked in on them, but with her hands to the wall on either side of his head and her mouth snarling centimeters from his, “You kissed me back.”

Teddy took her by the wrist and reeled her away from James. He let go as soon as there was space between the two of them.

“This is not helping a thing.” Lily looked at her shoes, the dangerous green heels. “Look, let’s all go out there, hang with our dates and revisit this later.” He swallowed. “And you two can come back to it whenever you want. I’m out of it for now. It’s up to you,” he glanced over his shoulder, “just not _here_ , okay?”

“Yeah,” Lily agreed first, which surprised him.

James came away from the wall slowly. He kept Teddy between himself and Lily, and Teddy couldn’t tell why, whether he didn’t trust himself or he didn’t trust his sister. It was gratifying, if anything in the whole mess was, to realize that at the very least James did trust him.

He remembered the way James had kissed him, all pressure and edges. He wondered how he’d kiss him now; he wondered how Lily’s mouth felt.

And then he stopped himself from wondering, because Lily was off limits and because Harry was coming through curtain.

His godfather stopped as the curtain fell shut behind him. He looked at the three of them, standing in a row and facing him. Teddy knew that they didn’t look innocent. He couldn’t read Harry’s face.

Lily said, “Hi, Dad.”

“Kids.” Harry ran a hand over his face. “Everyone’s wondering where you’ve got to.”

“We were just coming back.” James’s voice was steady. Teddy wondered if he was the only one who felt as if his lungs had jumped ship.

“Okay.” Harry stepped aside and gestured for them to go ahead. They did.

Teddy thought he might be imagining that Harry looked at his wrist as he passed him.

But then again, he very well might not have.

:::

“So,” Darren said, as soon as they were safely sprawled in his bed.

James stuffed his head under the covers, but Darren’s hand found him and patted at his hair, still messy from where Lily and Darren himself had run their hands through it, messed even further by the lengthy whirl of international Floo.

“We should probably talk about it,” Darren pointed out.

“I really don’t think we have to,” James told him.

“You wouldn’t, would you. But you’ve probably never talked about it with anyone, have you? Aside from her. Them? Whichever, I’m sure they’re not very helpful.”

“It’s fine.”

“No.” Darren tugged down the covers and James blinked at him. Only one of the bedside lamps was on; the whole room was dim. James shut his eyes anyway. Darren was looking too considerate, and James had kissed his _sister_ when Darren was in the next room.

“I do know that this is weird for you. I do get that.”

“Of course it’s weird. You’re not an imbecile. Why the fuck wouldn’t it be weird?”

“But what I’m trying to say,” Darren’s voice was more tense than James had ever heard it, “is that it’s weird for you, and for her,” he must have noticed the way James’s hands tightened into fists, because he added, “Lily,” and then continued, “it’s weird _for_ you, but I’m not calling _you_ weird, or abnormal, or strange, you see? I get why you’re here, though.” He slid down beside James in the bed and rested his head on James’s shoulder. “I get why you came here, and why you’re hiding.” James opened his mouth, but Darren shook his head, blond hair brushing James’s cheek. “You’re hiding and that’s not cowardice. It’s probably smart. But I also wouldn’t judge you if someday you decided to be stupid.”

“The rest of the world would,” James pointed out.

“What the fuck ever. The rest of the world can think whatever it wants. You’re one of a kind, James. You’re the fucking greatest.”

James let out a breath that sounded sort of like a laugh. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Well, yeah. I’m also the only person in your vicinity who can handle you.”

“I don’t need handling.”

Darren laughed. “You need a little bit,” he said. “Just a little.”

James tried not to think about Lily when he kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	5. chapter four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a description of tattooing in here which is 100% inaccurate and mostly informed by reading Wikipedia articles; if any of you have a better grasp of the art, feel free to correct me!

Summer had dragged in getting there. Now that it had come, though, Lily didn’t know what to do with herself. She returned to Al and Rose’s couch, paid minimal rent, and did not find a job because no one was hiring summer staff, not even the old restaurant. Her dad only agreed to pull strings for her within the Ministry; he thought she ought to get an internship for the summer.

It was a miracle, though, the way the Department of Mysteries took one look at her red hair and opened its doors. A bit of a surprising one, but it’s not as if, as an intern, she had any access to the truly secret information. She didn’t even know the names of half her coworkers; they used aliases, and a few took a dose of Polyjuice daily.

Or she wasn’t _supposed_ to have access to anything secret. Lily had her father’s invisibility cloak, though, and she had spent her childhood stealing coveted toys from under her brothers’ and cousins’ noses, so she was not unskilled in the talent of sneaking.

What Lily found, when she made it into the internal records of the Department of Mysteries, was that her father had not been mistaken when he said that the information that the wizarding world had on people with multiple soulmates was very lacking. It was shocking, in a way, how very little information the government had managed to gather on people like her.

Shocking, and maybe a little gratifying. Lily knew that she and James and Teddy weren’t alone—the minimal information at least proved that, if the Muggle records hadn’t—but the information with the Department of Mysteries indicated it was possible to live however they wanted to and keep it hidden from the Ministry.

That, she realized, was definitely a good thing.

And the Department of Mysteries had many other very interesting topics at hand.

Lily lost her summer in its stacks.

 

:::

The NEWT Potions class was too small.

This had never been a problem in the past and Teddy readily admitted the presence of Lily at the back—which was so close to the front!—of the classroom made it much much worse. Because she wasn’t avoiding him anymore.

She was herself, talking and challenging and embarrassingly beautiful, and almost eighteen but not nearly old enough for him to look at for as long as he wanted to.

He tried to treat her the way he treated his other students, but he knew he failed more often than not.

She was just—she was just there, and he was lonely.

She didn’t seem to be, which made him in parts relieved and, when he was fucking mopey and too young and too selfish, upset. That Lily wasn’t lonely was one of the good things life had granted him, but it was also one of the worst.

He tried not to think about what she might have been like if she were lonely.

He didn’t think about it during classes, steered his brain and his gaze away from her as if she were the most mediocre person he had ever met.

But sometimes he thought of how, if Lily were lonely, she would use his weakness for her as a lever for companionship. She’d find him at his most vulnerable, come to his room at night, refuse to leave.

How he’d just fall for her, if she tried to get him to.

How lucky he was, that she didn’t need him.

How unlucky he was, that he was starting to think he needed _someone_ , someone new and steady and familiar, and every time he thought that, he thought of her and her brother.

A travesty, he thought sometimes, that the soulmate marks had affected him so much.

He had been fine before.

:::

Lily was lonely. It wasn’t for a lack of people—her life seventh year was just as crowded with friends and family as it had been since its start. She still went on dates and hung out after parties and had gotten caught by professors other than Teddy in other broom closets. She was not timid and she was not alone, but occasionally she wanted something more.

At first she thought she was missing Sebastian. He had stopped talking to her briefly after she abandoned him at the Gala. She finally coerced him into meeting her for drinks, but they hadn’t really been together since that night, and she knew they were never going to go back to how things had been. She wasn’t sure what had changed; she knew she had mistreated him before the Gala, she didn’t understand why her treatment of him there was so much less forgivable.

Maybe he had gotten tired of it. And she couldn’t blame him. Maybe he realized that until he gave his soulmate a chance, he wouldn’t believe that anything else he had had any real viability—and neither would the person he was seeing.

Lily figured his mark had something to do with the shift in their relationship. He had started going on regular trips, to see if he could find his soulmate. The arrow kept shifting as he moved, getting more and more precise the closer he got, but, as he told Lily over drinks at the Hog’s Head a few weeks into the school year, “They could still be across the fucking ocean, for all I can tell.”

She didn’t know how to comfort him, so she just bought him another drink and let him talk.

She would never have his problem, the difficulty of finding her soulmate. She always knew where they were. Too acutely, she understood their exact locations. Teddy, standing at the front of the classroom, detailing the effects of a particular potion, explaining the wooziness caused by its vapors with a slight tilt of his head; James, body flat on his broomstick, shooting away from a flare of dragon fire over a Romanian forest.

So Lily saw Sebastian. She saw him and she saw her friends; she spent evenings in Hogsmeade or studying in the library or in abandoned classrooms. She fell asleep on the couch in front of the fireplace in the Slytherin common room with her head on Ris’s lap or her feet on Reggie’s. She and Hugo charted stars nightly. She was not alone.

But some nights she wanted to go and talk to Teddy. It was not a natural thing, she would have admitted that, had someone asked her. They had not grown up gravitating toward each other, especially not since Teddy turned eighteen. But Lily would notice an expression cross Teddy’s face during Potions, and she’d recognize it as amused, or stressed, or reservedly pissed off, and she’d spend hours wondering what had caused it. Wanting to get to know him, again, if she ever had, or anew, if she hadn’t.

And she couldn’t. She couldn’t just go down to his rooms and knock on the door the way she had two days after James’s birthday, because this would have been for her, not for James. This would have improved nothing.

But still, the thing was, she could have. She very easily could have walked down to Teddy’s room and knocked on the door and something told her he would not have turned her away.

It was that, probably, that stopped her. Because he might have wanted to turn her away, and he wouldn’t have, and that wouldn’t have been fair to him. She wanted him to come to her, or them to at least see each other as something approaching equals, and so she avoided the corridor that led to his rooms and surrounded herself with people in the evenings and decidedly did not think about the fact that her birthday was approaching—still months away, but getting nearer—and then—well, then what?

She didn’t really think anything would change.

But it could.

:::

“Look,” Darren told James just before Christmas, “I think I want to go for it.”

“Go for what?” James poured whisky into a pot of apple cider on the stove and searched in the drawer beside it for a wooden spoon, finally coming up with a metal soup spoon that would probably not result in his hand being burned irreparably.

“This soulmate thing.” Darren was sitting on the counter. He tapped his heel back against a cupboard as he spoke.

James turned to stare at him. His uncle and coworkers were in the living room, and the swell of their conversation carried him through the silence that followed Darren’s announcement.

“I thought you said it was too late?”

Darren leaned his head back against the cupboards and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t know. It might be. But I want to try. I’m not going to expect anything.”

The steam from the cider had turned James’s fingers bright red, and he dropped the spoon to the stove and shook his hand. “But you’re going to, just by nature of _going_ , you’re expecting something.”

“Okay. I’m expecting to find them,” Darren admitted. “Nothing else.”

“All right.” James lifted the pot from the stove and began pouring the drink into the glasses arranged on the counter. “Say you find them and they don’t want to know you. Will you be better off for having looked?”

“Maybe not, but at least I’ll know.”

“And then what?”

“I can’t make a plan for every eventuality.” He tugged his wand from his pocket and waved it, bringing the steaming glasses into the air and sending them as a flock toward the living room. He hopped from the counter to follow.

James stood by the stove for a little while longer, only joining Darren and the others when he heard his uncle ask, “Where’d my nephew get to?”

He walked Darren home that night, down the dark trail leading from the forest toward the bright haze of lights in town. Darren was a little drunk from the whisky, as well as a few surreptitious swigs he’d managed while preparing the second and third rounds, and he kept bumping into James as they walked.

“You’re upset,” he guessed.

“I’m not.” James was trying not to be. It wasn’t fair to be upset, especially considering how understanding Darren had been regarding James’s soulmates—how astonishingly open minded he’d been. But James didn’t want to be the one to be left.

“See.” Darren stopped in the middle of the path and turned to face James. They both had the tips of their wands lit, sticking from behind their ears, and they left a jagged halo around them. “Here’s the thing. When Lily turns eighteen, what’re you going to do?”

“Nothing,” James told him. “Nothing.”

“If she shows up here, or if the other one, Teddy, does, you know things will change. You can’t be that far in denial.”

“I’m not in denial at all,” James protested.

“Oh, you are. I would probably be happy,” Darren ran a hand through his hair, making wild shadows on the ground, “I think I would be happy, as best as I can know I would, to stay here with you. But I keep thinking you’re about to leave. I don’t believe you want to stay here.”

“I like it here.”

“I know.” Darren started walking. “But you’re not staying forever. Hell, I don’t think I want to stay _forever_. But I would if you were. And I’d leave if you left. And neither of us meant for this to be serious, and you aren’t—sorry, James, but you’re not a stable thing. So I’m going to go and find something else, something that is. I’m not going to wait for you to leave me.”

Because of course he didn’t want to be the one who was left, either.

James didn’t know what to say, so he just took Darren’s hand and walked on in silence. What else was there to do? He couldn’t ask Darren to stay, not when he knew Darren had a point.

:::

Albus didn’t have enough money to pay the owl who delivered his _Daily Prophet_. Theoretically he knew he should pay ahead, but then he never had enough money to manage a regular subscription, either.

He sent the owl fluttering with a jerk of his duvet, rubbed at the bloody gash on his neck where the bird’s beak had broke skin, and shouted, “Rose, save me,” a whine overtaking his tone as the bird resettled on top of his duvet and began tearing at it with its talons.

His door swung open and Rose said, “Merlin, Al, you’d think you’d learn. Here,” and then the bird was off of him, the sound of its wings pulsing the air loud as it sped through the window, Rose having paid it off. Again.

“You’re a lifesaver.” Albus peeked over the top of his covers to see her standing frizzy haired and angry in his bedroom door.

“You need to get a real job,” she told him. She crossed the room and stood at the foot of his bed, her hands on his hips. “Making just enough to cover rent is appreciated—it is, really—but you should be making more by now, Al.”

“I’m only a receptionist,” he pointed out. “I can’t be expected to make bank.”

“Granted, but the gallery should be giving you more hours. And since they’re not, it probably would be a good idea to find a new job.”

Albus groaned and pulled the covers back over his head. “Go away,” he mumbled.

“I’m serious, Albus. I know you say this position at the gallery is your ‘in’ to the art world, or whatever, but is it really an in if you never get past the doormat?”

“I don’t want to talk about this now,” Al said.

“Well, you should think about it.” She sat on the edge of his bed and he squinted from beneath his pillow to see her staring down at him, mouth set.

“Why?” Al asked.

“Because,” Rose tugged at a fistful of hair, “I’ve accepted a position as a research assistant in Glasgow.”

Albus sat up, the covers falling from his shoulders as he stared at Rose. “No,” he said, then again, fast, “no, no, no, no. You’re not moving away.”

“I am, Al.”

“How could you not tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you if I didn’t get the position. I didn’t think I would, but I did, and it’s too good to pass up, all right?”

“How long?” Al felt a little like he was preparing for an execution.

“I’m staying till the end of our lease, and then I’ll be moving. Look, Al, it’s fine. You can get Lily to move in with you, or something.”

“She’s not sticking around after she leaves school, you know that as well as I do. Besides,” Al drew his blankets around him, “she wouldn’t be making any more money than I do.”

“Like I said, you just need a better job. You know you can get one. Then you can cover enough of the rent here to stay, or to get a smaller flat.” Rose shook her head. “You need to settle down a little.”

“I don’t,” he protested, “I’m free as a fucking bird.”

“And that’s why you can’t pay for your paper.” He hit her with a pillow, but it wasn’t overly aggressive. She stood. “Look, I get that I’m blindsiding you with this, and I’m sorry. But just think about it, okay? Think about what you’re doing. And what you want to do.”  
“Yeah,” Al sank back into his pillows, “Sure. I’ll think about it.” He drew his rolled-up copy of the _Prophet_ against his chest and shut his eyes. “Later.”

Rose slammed his door behind her.

:::

Darren wanted James to sublet his flat while he went off searching for his soulmates.

James did not think it was a good idea.

“Why not?” Darren pleaded, a week before his planned departure. “I know you like it here.”

“It’s too far away from the dragons.” James leaned against the doorframe to Darren’s bedroom and watched as Darren pulled a checked shirt out of his drawers, wrinkled his nose at it, and tossed it on his pile designated for clothes to throw out.

“You can Apparate,” Darren pointed out, not irrationally.

James ignored this. “I don’t understand why you won’t just give up your lease. Move everything to storage.”

“Because,” Darren leaned inside his wardrobe so James had to struggle to hear him, “that would be a serious commitment, and I don’t know yet if I want to commit fully to this.”

“But if I’m still here, waiting, that could be an easy way out.” James didn’t think he was being irrational, but Darren came out of the wardrobe enough to shoot a careless Jelly Legs hex his way. James dodged it easily.

“I don’t take easy ways out. I’m just saying, if I find them and they’ve got a family or are happy or whatever, I don’t want to have to live in hostels until I can find a new flat. I want somewhere I can come back to.” He cut the next words off harshly, “Not someone.”

James was surprised at how much the statement hurt him. “Okay,” he shrugged, “fine.” He leaned his head back against the doorframe and stared at the ceiling. “But I’m not moving in here, because I like living with my uncle, because this is not in the reserve, because I’m not going to be tied to you even when you’re not here, all right?”

“Fine,” Darren said, “whatever. I’ll find someone else.”

“Fine,” James turned and drifted toward the kitchen, “are you still coming up for dinner? We should get going.”

“I guess, if you’ll still have me.”

“Of course,” James said.

Albus was sitting on the front steps when they got to Charlie’s. He looked exhausted, which surprised James, because as far as he could tell Al didn’t do much of anything.

James dropped beside him, and Darren perched on the very edge of the steps. They all sat in silence for a while, and then James asked, “So, are you moving in too?”  
“Rose is effectively kicking me out.”

“Effectively?” James elbowed him. “That doesn’t sound like Rose.”

“Well, she’s moving, and I can’t afford rent on my own. As everyone knows. So, basically. In general, you know.”

“And you can’t find a new flatmate?”

“Everyone we know sucks.”

“So you are moving in?”

“I’m moving _out_ , that’s all I know.”

Darren said, “Well, I need someone to sublet my flat. I bet it’s cheaper than London rent.”

“Selling my soul for an alley in hell would be cheaper than London rent,” Albus muttered, then, leaning around James with a wide grin, asked, “Wait, seriously? I could stay here?”

“If you can pay rent.”

“Hey,” James tugged at the sleeve of Albus’s t-shirt, “you realize you have a job in London? Which is something you don’t have here. Which you need in order to pay rent?”  
“Uncle Charlie let you in with the dragons.”

James shook his head. “No. You’re terrible with animals. And you don’t want that, anyway. What was the point of working at the gallery if you’re going to give it up just because you can’t afford your swanky apartment? Just get a new job, stay in London, downsize your flat.”

“Why, James,” Al threw his hand to his chest, “it’s almost as if you don’t want me here.”

“That isn’t it. It’s just that I don’t understand why _you_ want you here.”

Al shrugged. “Something different, right? Something new.”

“What if you found a job in the village? If you find one, you can have my flat. That’s fine.” Darren pointed at James. “It’d be good. You wouldn’t be lonely.”

“I have friends,” James protested.

“Yeah, but not good ones.”

“I have good friends.”

Darren shook his head. James’s face was red.

“Hey,” Al nudged James, “is there an art gallery in town?”

“The town is a village,” James said, “it’s barely Hogsmeade.”

“Hogsmeade is amazing,” Al said, “so no art gallery?”  
“No art gallery,” James confirmed.

“There is a tattoo parlor,” Darren suggested.

Al was silent for a minute. Then he said, “See? A tattoo parlor. That’s art.”

James dropped his head into his hands.

            :::

“Al’s moved to Romania,” Lily told Hugo one morning in February. She was reading a letter, her owl Hestia perched on Hugo’s head and tugging at his curls. He shooed her away with a buttered piece of toast.

“He’s what?” Hugo dropped the toast to the table once Hestia had flown off.

“Moved to Romania. He’s apparently moved to James’s boyfriends? Ex’s? Whatever, into Darren’s flat.”

“Why?” Hugo reached up to try to smooth down his hair. Ris shook her head at him and tugged the letter out of Lily’s hand.

“He says Rose kicked him out. I didn’t think she had it in her.”

“My sister is very strong willed.”

“Yeah, except never with Al. That’s weird. Anyway, why couldn’t he just move in with someone else?”

“He says he’s working at a tattoo parlor,” Ris said around a mouthful of croissant. “That’s interesting.”

“It’s different, for sure.”  
“Why, do you think? Obviously it’s not just because Rose left.”

“My bet is he’s bored and out of ways to distract himself.”

“And moving to Romania is a way to do that? From what James says it doesn’t sound very exciting.” Hugo shrugged and pushed his plate toward the center of the table. “Odd. I’ve got Quidditch. I’ll see you both later?”

Lily waved a hand at him. Ris rested her chin on the table and looked up at Lily out of the corner of her eye.

“So, two brothers in Romania. Is that your grand plan after leaving school, too?”  
“Obviously not.” Lily shoved Ris’s head to the side. “I’m much more original than either of them.”

“Well, what are your plans, then?”

“It’s only February. I’ve got time to figure it out.” Lily stood, and Ris followed her from the hall.

“We do,” Ris admitted. “I am a little worried, though.”

“About what we’re going to do?”

“I mean.” Ris shrugged, then tapped at her bracelet, which her mother had bought her. Silver and green, as was only appropriate. “Do we go for it or not?”  
“I’m not,” Lily told her. “Going for it, I mean.”

Ris stopped halfway up the marble staircase and turned to face Lily. Lily met her gaze. “You’re not? Why not?”

Lily shrugged. “Everyone says it’s important to find your soulmate. Everyone says you’ll never settle down until you do.” She smiled at Ris. “I’m not at all interested in settling down, though, so why look for—why go looking?”

Ris started walking again. “That’s a philosophy I can get behind.”

“If you want to, you can go off, you know.”

“I know,” Ris muttered, “I mean, who the fuck knows, I might know them already. But it sounds boring, like you said. Doesn’t it? Just to follow this path because we’re supposed to? We’ve done a lot of that, haven’t we? Why not take a little detour?”

“Why not,” Lily agreed. Her future path, she thought, was not going to follow any sort of natural progression. She might as well keep what company she had on her diversions for as long as she could.

            :::

Ioana liked Albus a lot. She still hadn’t trusted him with the needles, but he had a good eye for art and his sketches of what people suggested for tattoos were typically spot on. She hadn’t had an unsatisfied customer in the two months since he’d started working in her shop.

He was starting to get antsy, though. In the downtime, when she was cleaning her machine and going through their accounting and supplies, Albus scribbled out sketch ideas on large sheets of paper, adding bright colors with squeaky swipes of markers.

“What’s bothering you?” She was standing in front of the counter, where Albus was drawing a large swirly fish across the back of some order slips. She pushed her black plastic glasses up her nose when he raised his head to look at her.

“Nothing.”

He sounded like a sulky teenager. “You sound like a sulky teenager,” she told him.

He rubbed at his face. “I fucking know.”

“So?” She tugged the sheet of paper from beneath his hand and looked at it. “This is pretty good. Too bad most people around here would rather a dragon than a fish.”

“Somewhere in the world there’s somebody who would love it, though,” Al said. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Of course.” Ioana returned the drawing to the counter. “Are you going to become a migrant tattoo artist?”

“Can’t really be a tattoo artist if I don’t know how to actually give a tattoo, can I?”  
“Do you want to learn?” Ioana had been thinking about it for a while. It might have been a terrible idea, but Albus was the best employee she’d had in years, and if anything went wrong, at least she knew it wouldn’t completely derail him.

“Would you teach me?”

Ioana smiled. “Yeah, Al. I’ll teach you.”

“How?”

“How do you learn?” Ioana gestured for him to follow her behind the curtain into the back of the shop. “I’ve been teaching you for a while, you know that. Now you learn by giving someone a tattoo.”

“Who?” Al’s voice shook a little.

Ioana smiled. “Well, me, I guess.”

She guided him through the steps. He had used the ink before, and cleaned the supplies, and she’d had him practice the motions and so was not entirely unfamiliar with the process. She held up her ankle and tapped the spot above the jut of her bone. “You can draw your fish here,” she told him.

He smiled at her, his face lit up.

It came out a little sloppy, and it hurt more than any tattoo she’d received in years, but it was possibly her favorite. The swirls were artful, and he told her the colors he envisioned for the scales, which would be added at a later time, and she squeezed his shoulder after he had wrapped her skin in gauze. “You did good, Al.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ll go over technique a little next time, but sometime soon you’ll be able to give someone who’s not me a tattoo. And eventually,” she shrugged, “I’ve been thinking about taking a vacation for a long time.”  
He bit the smile back. His face shook with it.

:::

Ginny stood in the door to their bedroom. Harry was undoing the buttons on his robe, and he caught sight of her in the mirror first. She looked pale, her hair redder than normal, but he wasn’t sure if that was just an effect of the reflection. He turned around. She still looked off color.

“Ginny?”

She bit her lip. “Do you remember my Sorting?”

He shook his head, slowly, and she continued, “Oh, that’s right. The car and the Willow and Snape, and all. I had forgotten.” He waited. “At my Sorting,” she said, “McGonagall was still holding the Hat when it put me in Gryffindor. It was over so fast.”

Harry knew she didn’t need to hear his Sorting story again. “It was pretty obvious,” he said instead, “that you belonged there.”  
“Right?” Ginny laughed, sounding impossibly young. “Right? But now I’m just stuck wondering what happened.”

Harry stared at her across the expanse of floor. She had her arms across her chest; he wasn’t about to cross any lines, but he wasn’t sure why she was holding herself so far from him. This conversation made no sense. “What do you mean? You’d still be a Gryffindor today.”  
“Would I? I don’t think so. I think I’m a coward today. I’d have gotten sent home straight off. The Hat wouldn’t have even bothered.”

Ginny was the least cowardly person Harry had ever met. “You’re the bravest person I know,” he told her.

She shook her head. “No, I’m not. The second James was born I started being scared. I haven’t stopped since.”

“That’s not cowardice,” Harry said, relieved, “that’s parenthood.”  
“No it’s not.” Her tone was fiery. She was about to stamp her foot, he could see it in the way her stance shifted. She stopped herself, though. Her temper confused and enthralled him, still. “Because I’m not scared about normal parent things. Or, I am,” she corrected, because Harry had been about to correct her himself, “but I am most scared about his soulmate marks, and what they mean. I’m scared of them, and I haven’t handled it bravely at all. I’ve handled it like a coward. I’ve denied it. I’ve denied it so much I’ve never asked you—for nearly eighteen years I haven’t asked you—why did you cover up Lily’s wrist before I could see hers?”  
Harry drew a breath that didn’t quite make it to his lungs. He coughed into the bend of his elbow, his robes hanging half undone, the t-shirt beneath them much too thin for the glare Ginny was leveling at him.

When his coughing fit was over he said, “Because she had two, too.”

Ginny sank to her knees right there, in the doorway to their bedroom, and covered her face with her hands. Harry finally closed the space between them and knelt in front of her, wrapping his hands around her wrists but not pulling her hands away. He couldn’t quite face the look in her eyes yet.

“I should have told you. I know I should have. If you were a coward,” because she’d never believe she hadn’t been, “I was more of one. I was worse, Gin.”

“You were trying to protect me.” The words sounded like they hurt coming out.

“I was,” Harry admitted, “but I went about it all wrong.”

“We went about it all wrong,” Ginny corrected. “I could have asked. Any good mother would have.”  
“No.” Harry pressed his forehead against hers, the pressure of her nails against his eyebrows. “No. You have been a wonderful mother. We have done things wrong—both of us. But everyone does, you know that. People are not going to be perfect. Our children have grown up well—and that may be in spite of us, but I know—and you know, too, you have to—that we have not failed them. We’ve made mistakes,” he thought of Lily standing in Neville’s office, everything about her a challenge; of Albus drunk at fifteen in the middle of London, of the photographs that graced the front page of the _Prophet_ for days; of James in the kitchen, going suddenly still and silent with rage, “but our kids are good, Ginny.”

“We handled James terribly,” she said, “horrendously. Lily turns eighteen in a month.”

Harry held his breath. “She knows,” he confessed. “She’s known since she was little. She saw,” he hurried to add, when he realized Ginny might blame him for this, “she saw when Albus undid their bracelets. She didn’t say anything, but she saw.”  
Ginny pulled away from him, dropping her hands and rising to her feet in a swift movement. He looked up at her. His nose was level with a spot of bleach on the thigh of her jeans. She looked fiery and distant. “How do you know, then?”

“After James,” Harry set his palms flat on the floor, about to lever himself up, but Ginny’s expression told him he should stay where he was, “I went to Hogwarts. I went to tell her, but she said she already knew.”

Ginny’s lips went thin. “I almost understand,” she said, “not telling me. I didn’t ask,” she reasoned, and it was more like she was reminding herself, not him, like she was telling herself not to commit murder, “but not telling me before you spoke to Lily? I can’t.” She pressed her fist to her mouth. “I’m going for a ride.”

Harry heard the sound of her broomstick speeding by their window minutes later. He was still on the floor.        

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	6. chapter five

Rose asked Lily to meet her for coffee over Easter holidays. Lily hadn’t said much to Rose since she had moved to Scotland; the problem with their family was that it was so big that getting time with anyone who wasn’t directly in the way was difficult. But Lily took the train to Glasgow cheerfully enough in the middle of the week.

Rose met her by the Costa in the train station. She looked happier than Lily had seen her in a while. Not that Rose had been unhappy, necessarily. She had just been unfulfilled, Lily thought, and the way she looked now was the opposite of that.

“Hi, hi.” Rose pulled her into a quick hug and then led the way from the train station, down toward the shopping center. “Thought we might get a coffee a little more into the city. Do you want to see my flat? It’s really nice, much nicer than Al and mine ever was.”

“Because Al’s such a slob?”

“No.” Rose wore small heels, and they clicked as they walked down the pavement. “Well, a little. But mostly because I know I’m staying here for longer. I feel more settled. Have you seen him recently?”

Lily shook her head. “Not since just before he left. I know you all saw him at Christmas.”  
“Yeah, while you were off chasing kangaroos or whatever.” Rose’s tone was a bit bitter. Ris and Lily had gone to Australia to spend Christmas with Ris’s mother, who worked for a Hollywood studio doing set designs and had been working on a film there throughout November and December.

“And missed out on Potter-Weasley family Christmas, which you well know is my favorite holiday.”

“You were in Australia, shut up.” Rose elbowed Lily, continuing to push until they ducked into a warm coffee shop to their left.

They ordered their drinks and found an empty table at the center of the shop, and then Lily asked, “Have you seen Al since Christmas?”

“Yeah, I went to visit a couple of weeks ago. He’s doing well. Did you hear he’s working for a tattoo artist? I saw some of his tattoos, he does really well.” Lily rubbed a hand over her wrist, the one covered by her bracelet, and nodded.

“He told me. I’m glad to hear he hasn’t messed anyone’s up too badly.”

“His boss is this terrifying old woman, white-haired and covered in ink, but when she talks to him you can tell she almost respects him. I swear, if he’s not careful he’ll wind up inheriting her shop when she goes, and then he’ll never be able to leave.”

“He might like that.”

“I don’t know.” Rose took a sip from her coffee. “I think he likes the work a lot, but I don’t think he wants to stay there forever. I think he’ll move back to London eventually.”

“We’ll see.” Lily didn’t want to get her hopes up.

“Eventually he’ll probably want to find whoever ST is.”

“Maybe.” Lily shrugged. “He never really seemed all that interested, though, did he?”

“Probably because you and James are both so blasé about it. He can’t be too interested if neither of you are.”

“That’s dumb.” Lily used a stirrer to draw a design in the foam on the top of her latte. “He’d never do something just because we did it or didn’t. You know that. Besides, James used to care.”

“Before he saw who his was. Do you ever wonder about that?”

Lily focused on her drink. “It’s like our parents said. There’s nothing that says you _have_ to be with that person. James probably just doesn’t like whoever it is.”

Rose narrowed her eyes. “You know who it is,” she accused, “don’t you?”

“I haven’t talked to James much since he left.”

“You know,” Rose repeated. “Whatever, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about, really. I wanted to know what you think about this.” She loosened her own bracelet and held out her wrist so Lily could see the RN there, looking just the same as it had the last time Lily saw it, sitting in her bedroom beside Hugo, except that now there was an arrow beside it, pointing out the door.

“I think I know who it is,” Rose said, “and I’m not sure if I want to explore it. They’re still at Hogwarts,” she explained, “and I didn’t really know them. And I just…James seems happy. So does Al. Hugo hasn’t talked about his since that day. I don’t know.” She looked down at her coffee. “And what you say, what your parents said…why do we have soulmates if we don’t need them?”

Lily leaned back. “Most Muggles say they’re the person with whom you’d raise the most successful children. They say it’s a science, just biology.”

“We didn’t learn that in Muggle Studies.”

Lily shrugged. “I did some outside research. I think what they say is not necessarily the case, because it’s not like all people will—or can—have or adopt kids. I think there’s some mix of things, some magical and some scientific, going on. I don’t think anyone really knows.”

“What does that mean, then, for us? Do we just leave it be? Like, whatever, either you end up with your soulmate or you don’t? Either you make an effort or you don’t?” Rose shook her head. “I’m not explaining myself well. I just mean—even with what your parents told us, and what mine told me and Hugo, I always thought it’d end up being natural. Like it was for so many people. For your parents, and mine, and—just, everyone in our family. Why is it so hard for us?”

“I think,” Lily said, “and this Is not to say anything bad about our families, but I think  that maybe we’re more resistant to settling than them. We’re not going to take the obvious option just because it’s obvious—even if it’s not easy, it would still seem self-evident to go after that person.” She jutted her chin toward Rose’s bare wrist. “They had crazy childhoods, grew up fast. A lot of them might have wanted to settle down. They definitely wanted something comforting. I don’t know about you,” Lily looked at Rose, “I really don’t, but I want to be independent—completely independent—for a little while. I don’t think that’s unique to me, either. I think most people aren’t interested in slipping into a ‘normal’ life right away.”

“So you think it’s okay if I don’t go for it right away?”

“I think it’s okay if you never go for it, or if you do right this second. It’s up to you, Rose. I’m not going to judge.”

“Yeah,” Rose tilted her head, “but other people might.”

And Lily, feeling the familiarity of the words, said, “Who the fuck cares. Do what’s right for you, and if whoever’s on your wrist shows up, talk to them. See what they’re thinking. You could go see them, you know.” Lily nodded. “Because here’s the thing about all this: there are two people involved. And you don’t owe them a thing, and they don’t owe you a thing, but it’s probably best to be up front now.”

Rose looked at Lily for a long moment. “You saw your mark, didn’t you? You know way too much about this to not know.”

Lily considered her answers. “I saw,” she settled on.

“And you know who it is?” Rose prompted.

“Yeah.” Lily crossed her legs.

“And you don’t see it going anywhere?”

“I’m not talking about it,” Lily said. “All right? I’ll talk about yours if you want to, but mine is off limits.”

“That’s dumb, Lil. You should talk to someone. Who better than me?”

“You’ve heard my theory,” Lily said, “You know I think it’s not important.”

But she was starting to wonder.

:::

Ginny stood at the window in the kitchen. She hadn’t spoken to Harry in two days. She wasn’t sure whether she was angrier at him, herself, or the fact that she felt her children had been cursed—when that was not necessarily the case. She tried to remind herself that society was what made the rules, that the rules were not things that existed naturally. That multiple soulmate marks were things that existed. They were natural. Society was treating them wrong and she, she tried to remember, should not be a part of society.

Harry was at work. She was supposed to be at work, but her coffee had spilled on her robes that morning and she had resigned herself to being late. The robes were sitting undone in the laundry and she was standing in an old shirt from the Harpies and a pair of Harry’s pajama bottoms, drinking newly brewed coffee at the sink, and deciding whether she had forgiven Harry yet.

Whether Harry had actually done something that needed forgiving was irrelevant. She thought he had. Maybe it was not recent, maybe it was nearly two decades old, but there was a deception there. Intentional. With good intentions, maybe, but still intentional. So he needed to be forgiven. By her.

But was she ready?

The silence was wearing on her. Harry was respecting her, and that upset her, because he was so good even when he was in the wrong. It made it difficult to remain angry at him.

And that meant she wanted to stay angry at him. That was significant, she thought.

She set her empty coffee cup down on the counter and went to get dressed. And then she Apparated to Hogsmeade, where she followed the still-familiar path to Hogwarts.

The headmistress was surprised to see her. “Lily’s been fine all year,” she said. “She’s caused no problems.”  
Ginny thought she ought to be worried that the headmistress’s first response to seeing her was to defend Lily. But she couldn’t bring up the energy for it. She would be worried about Lily following the rules, if she didn’t know that Lily had probably gotten better at not getting caught.

“I’m not here because I heard she had done something,” Ginny said, “I’d just like to speak to her.”

The headmistress nodded. “Of course. I’ll have her meet you here?”

Ginny looked around at the portraits, many of which were feigning sleep. Dumbledore let out an aggressive snore. She saw a sliver of blue between his painted lashes.

“No,” she said, “perhaps somewhere quieter. An empty classroom?”

“There are no Charms classes right now,” the headmistress said after a thoughtful minute, “how about there?”  
Ginny sat on the professor’s empty desk in the abandoned Charms classroom the headmistress led her to and waited for Lily, who arrived in the doorway minutes later slightly out of breath.

“Mum. What’re you doing here? Is everything okay?”

Ginny had, stupidly, thought that Lily would look different. That by knowing this secret, she would also see through Lily’s other secrets. But she was just Lily, who carried her shoulders the way Harry did, with Ginny’s red hair, and Weasley eyes, Fred’s eyes, George’s and Ron’s and Charlie’s eyes, but not Ginny’s eyes.

“Everything’s fine.” Ginny realized she had been staring at her daughter, and that Lily’s evident panic had not lessened any because of it. It was a little surprising to see Lily so aggravated.

But then, Ginny had never shown up at school before, and she imagined that when Harry had his visit had not exactly eased Lily’s mind.

“What’re you doing here, then?” Lily shut the door behind her. She had good instincts, always had.

“Your dad and I had a talk.”

Lily’s hand went immediately to the bracelet on her wrist. She crossed the room slowly, and perched on the edge of a desk in front of Ginny. She crossed her ankles and waited.

“He said that you know about your marks,” Ginny hesitated, “and that you know I didn’t know.”

Lily nodded. “It’s all right,” she said. “It really is.”

“I handled this all very badly,” Ginny admitted. “I wanted you to know that. And that I’m sorry. It’s just because I love you, and I love James, and I didn’t want either of you to suffer, and so I ignored the fact of James’s and I ignored the fact that I didn’t know about yours, and of course that has not helped you sort this out at all, and so.” Ginny ran a hand over her face. “I just wanted to apologize. Because I have not acted like a mother. And I also wanted to tell you that if you ever need to talk about it, I am here. And I may not react well at first,” her eyes were hard as they met Lily’s, but she hoped that it was not a frightening glare but instead a challenging one, “but I will damn well try to be the mother you deserve.”

“Mum,” Lily stared at her. She looked horrified. “You’ve been good. You’ve been great. This,” she held up her wrist, “has not been some horrible sad thing in my life. You didn’t need to do this,” which, Ginny thought, meant that Lily wished she hadn’t. Lily liked things unspoken; Ginny knew that.

“I needed to do it for me. Even if it was uncomfortable for you.” Ginny slid from the desk, shrugged. “I’m sorry about that. I just want to make sure we’re clear.”

“Very,” Lily said, “very clear. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

Ginny believed her.

She gave Harry two more days of silence, and then forgave him completely. After all, it was Lily’s life. And Lily, as she was, seemed capable of navigating on her own. And that was what really mattered.

:::

Darren sent James a letter. He said he had found one of his soulmates and that he, he wrote his name and then crossed it out and then wrote it again, so hard his pen cut the paper, _Killian Moore_ , had not settled with anyone. That he had been living much as Darren had, biding his time.

James tried not to think about the fact that he was _how_ Darren had been biding his time. He knew Darren hadn’t meant that, and if he had, then that he hadn’t meant anything by i _t_. But Darren sounded so happy, so excited about his future with Killian and how well they connected and how now they were going to find their last soulmate, whoever that might be, that James still felt the sick shame of rejection. Even if Darren hadn’t intended to reject him, or if Darren had rejected him months ago and it was only just now hitting James that that was what had happened—either way, the feel of it was still overwhelming as he set the letter aside, tugged on his shoes, and left the house.

He was in the village before he really thought about it, swinging by one of his favorite bars—the one where he had met Darren, coincidentally—and getting a scotch before continuing on to Albus and Ioana’s tattoo shop.

Ioana was perched on the counter, reading a book with a cover so tattered that James couldn’t make out the title. Al wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but the vibrating sound of the tattoo machine was issuing from the back, so James assumed he was behind the curtain.

Ioana didn’t look up.

James sat in one of the plastic chairs beneath the windows and picked up a notebook full of photographs of tattoos. The store performed tattoos on both Muggles and wizards, and so the photographs didn’t move. They had photos of possible tattoos for wizards in the back where the machine was, magical tattoos that moved themselves. James found those distracting, like the soulmate marks of people who hadn’t settled but didn’t leave theirs covered. He preferred Muggle tattoos, although he knew that Ioana preferred to give wizard ones. Al said he hadn’t had enough experience with either to have a preference.

“This is not a coffee shop, Mr. Potter.” Ioana still hadn’t looked up from her book, as far as James could tell. “I can tell your brother you were looking for him, if you want, and you can talk after work today.”

“I’m not here to talk to Albus.” James didn’t look up from the photographs of the tattoos, either, for all that he was flipping through the pages without really seeing them.

Ioana set her book down. “Are you here to talk to me?”

“No,” James followed her lead, “I’m here to get a tattoo.”

Ioana’s face brightened. Her eyes sparkled. “From me or Al?”

“Al. He’d be offended if I didn’t.”

“Of course. Magical or non?”

“Non.”

“Of what?”

“I thought I’d let Al choose.”

Ioana tapped her chin. “That’s dangerous, you know.”

“I do, but he’s my brother. If he fucks it up he’ll still have to deal with me for the rest of his life.”

She laughed, a husky rough sound that surprised James. He’d never seen her so easygoing before. “It is a lot of pressure on your brother, though. He has to show he knows you.”

“It isn’t,” James argued, “because he does.”

Ioana raised her eyebrows. “We’ll see,” she said.

Al practically clapped his hands when he followed a short woman, who was clutching her gauze-wrapped forearm to her chest and smiling brightly, from the back.

“You’re not here for a tattoo,” he said.

James nodded. “I’m all yours.”

“Fantastic.” Al scrabbled around beneath the counter and emerged with a sketchpad. “So this is what I have in mind for your first.”

James didn’t protest about the assumption that he’d get more than one, because the page Al showed him was covered with a detailed drawing of a dragon. It was stunning.

“I thought, over your shoulder?”

“I love it,” James told Al. “I really really do.”

It took a few sessions, painful because James wanted it done the Muggle way, but when it was finished James could hardly stop looking in the mirror. He hated that it was still cold out, because he wanted to go out shirtless, to show off the dragon that sprawled over his shoulder, clawed feet and fangs over his chest, ridged back along the edge of his shoulder blade, tail curling tightly over to circle on his spine.

It was absolutely perfect. Al colored it green, its eyes a deep blue. It looked real. It looked deadly.

James didn’t know if it suited him as he was or who he wanted to be, or if it just suited where he was, but he didn’t even try to give Al a hard time about it. It was unequivocally breathtaking.    

:::

It was Lily’s last morning at Hogwarts. Early, so early the sun wasn’t all the way up yet. She stood in the hallway outside of Teddy’s rooms and rocked back on her heels. She considered the merits of knocking.

She considered the drawbacks.

She knocked.

He didn’t open the door right away. He took long enough that she thought maybe he wasn’t there.

When he did come to the door, after Lily knocked again, his hair was sticking up and his eyes were barely open. He didn’t say anything. He stepped back to let her in.    

She ducked beneath his arm before he shut the door, and then he leaned back against it and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“Why’re you here?” he asked, voice a mumbled rasp.

“I’m going to the States next week.”

He blinked at her. “For how long?”  
Lily shrugged. “As long as I want. I’m going to stay with Ris and her mum for a while.”

“Okay.” Teddy rubbed at his chin, where stubble darkened his skin. “Why?”

“For fun.” Lily shrugged. “Because I don’t know what I want to do. Because Al’s in Romania.”

“You’re not eighteen yet,” Teddy reminded her.

“Yeah.” Lily reached out and tugged at his bracelet, pulling him toward her. He followed the pressure until they were only a foot apart, Lily looking up at him. “I know.”

“Not until August,” he said.

“And I’ll be in L.A.”

“ _Why_?” Teddy repeated.

“I don’t really want to wait,” Lily said.

“That’s not an answer.” Teddy ran his hand through his hair.

“No,” Lily agreed, “it’s not. I’m here,” she explained, “because I don’t want to wait.”

“Lil.” Teddy spoke softly. “It’s a really bad idea.”

“Hey.” Lily slid her finger between the bracelet on his wrist and the soft skin there, pressing her finger flat against the hard lines of his tendons. “It’s there on your skin, isn’t it? Right there? Why’s it a bad idea?”

“You’re too,” and he bit his lip.

Lily, even though she knew very well that he had stopped because he knew this would be her response, said, “Two months is not a long time.”

“It’s not exactly,” he rolled his shoulders back. He didn’t pull away from her. “It’s not fair, is it?”

“You mean to James.”

She wouldn’t let him look away from her. She met his dark gaze with hers, and raised her chin. “I mean to James,” he admitted. “When we have this talk, he should be here. When we make decisions, he should be here.”

Lily nodded. “I think so too. Which is why we’re not having a talk. Which is why we’re not saying _anything_.”

“We,” Teddy slid his hand away, so her finger slipped from beneath his bracelet. He lifted it to catch at her chin, though, fingers trailing along her cheek, thumb along the hard edge of her jawline. “Whatever we do, that’s a decision.”

“Okay,” Lily said. “Sure. But it’s not a permanent thing, necessarily. What we do, that’s just a few minutes.”

Teddy looked at her. “You make no sense,” he said, “but I’m willing to pretend you do.”

Lily grinned, a flash of delight. “That’s all I ask.” And then she pushed forward, so his hand dislodged from her cheek and dropped to her shoulder, and she kissed him.

He didn’t hesitate before kissing her back, and his hand slid down her arm. His fingers twined with hers and he led her, after their initial soft kiss, across the room and into his bedroom.

Lily barely looked around as he led her to the bed. She hopped up on it and pulled his face back to hers. She didn’t stop kissing him for a long time.

They undressed each other easily. Everything was happening slowly, Lily’s hands on the waistband of Teddy’s pajama bottoms, Teddy’s fingers undoing the buttons down the front of Lily’s shirt. It felt like they were swimming, in the dimness of Teddy’s bedroom, the tangled white of his sheets. Lily’s head was a million places, but at the very front of every thought was the very reality of _Teddy_ , the roughness of the skin at his elbows and the soft creases at his waist. The way he looked at her, like he didn’t believe in her. But a good kind of disbelief, she thought, as her nails dug into his shoulder blades. A kind like her existence was unreal. Like their existence, at that moment, was something entirely outside time, too good for the world they lived in.

And then Lily stopped thinking, because Teddy’s voice was saying her name, again and again, and she had to move to catch his breath in her mouth.

He didn’t say anything as she dressed in the newly bright daylight spilling from the enchanted windows lining one wall of his room, magicked, like the ceiling of the Great Hall, to reflect the skies outside.

She came back to the bed, kneeling on the edge of the mattress. He was biting his lip. His eyes were lighter than usual, a gray which looked somehow flinty despite its brightness. “Don’t panic,” she told him.

He touched her mouth with two fingers. “I don’t know how I’ll look at your parents ever again.”

She reached up and tugged at his wrist so he dropped his hand. “You look at them like you always have.” He looked about to speak again, so she said, “Like you wouldn’t do anything to hurt their family. Like you never have. Like,” she looked down at his hand, where it was pressed against the sheets, where his elbow bent as he leaned up. “Well, like when you were eighteen you realized that me and James were important, and like you still kept looking at my parents after that. Look at them like you respect them, and like you respect me.” She lifted her face. She knew her gaze was hard. He met it.

“I knew you and James were important a long time before I turned eighteen. I just didn’t realize what _kind_ of important.”

Lily touched the back of his hand. “See? You’ll be fine with my parents. I’m going now.” She stood from the bed. “I’ll write.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and tugged his boxers on to follow her from the room.

“Lil?” He touched her shoulder before she could open the door. She turned. He looked at her like she might disappear. “We need, I need…something. I need to know, are you going to tell James?”

“He wasn’t here,” she said unnecessarily, “I’m not sure if he needs to know.”

“If anything happens in the future, though. If we ever actually talk, Lil—if anything ever happens,” he repeated, “he should know.”

“I’m not going to tell him.” Lily shook her head. “I’m not—we’re not there yet. But if you want to, Teddy, I’m not asking you not to.”

“You don’t care,” he said, and it wasn’t a question but he didn’t believe her.

“I don’t care, because this,” she gestured back toward his bedroom, “wasn’t about more than me and you, but this,” she gestured at the space between them, “will always be about more than just us. So if you want to be honest about that,” to his bedroom again, “then I understand.”

“Because of this,” he touched his bracelet, and she cocked her head.

“Because of that,” she acknowledged. “But also because…just because of James, I guess.”

And even though she didn’t think that made any more sense than anything she’d said when she first stepped through his door, he nodded like it did.

“Okay,” he said. He rocked back on his heels. “I’ll see you.”

“Yeah,” she said, and left.

:::

Albus stuck a card under James’s nose. It had a dragon on the front, and in flickering, billowing flames across the inside, it said, “Congratulations, you’re on fire!”

“That’s horrible.” James tugged the card from his brother’s hand and dropped it to the coffee table in front of the couch.

“It’s beautiful, you mean.” Al sat on James’s feet. “I made it, you can’t insult it.”

“The pun, I meant. The drawing’s good.” James tried to get his feet from under Al’s legs, but didn’t manage it. “But you knew that, because you know you’re good. People wouldn’t let you draw on them permanently if you weren’t.”

“And yet you still won’t let me give you a second one. It’s enough to make me doubt myself.” Al threw his head back against the couch, and James gave a pathetic jerk of his feet. Al barely shifted.

“That’s because I don’t want to rush into it. The dragon’s good for now.”

Al hummed. “Well, whatever. If you don’t let me give you another one by the time I leave then I’ll know you’re lying.”

“When _are_ you leaving?” Al kept talking about leaving, but he never made any moves toward finding a new job, or finding a new tenant for Darren’s place—which was basically his, by this point.

Al shrugged. “I don’t know. Whenever. This,” he kicked at the card with a bare foot, “is for our sister. Who has just left Hogwarts and is embarking on the new stage in her life without us there. So I think the least we can do is send her a cute and clever card.”

“Clever,” James snorted.

“I don’t see you doing anything for her,” Al observed, “so don’t be an ass.”

“I’ll sign it. I didn’t say I wouldn’t sign it.”

“You seemed to suggest that you wouldn’t. That you didn’t want your name associated with such trash.”

“I wouldn’t call it trash if you’d get the fuck off of me.”  
Al laughed and stood. “Better? Now do you think it’s cute and clever?”

James sat up and reached for the card. He looked at the dragon on the front. Its wings flicked energetically, sending a spray of violet sparks across the paper. He opened it, looked at the artfully charmed words, and shook his head. “Lily will love it, but you know that already.”

“She will,” Albus said confidently. “Although she might burn it just on policy.”

“What policy is that?” James scrounged beneath the stacks of papers and receipts on the table for a pen. Finding one stuck between the pages of a thick book, he tugged the cap off with his teeth and scrawled his name beneath the jagged flames.

“You’re ignoring her so she’ll burn anything that has your writing on it.”

“I’m not ignoring her.” James chucked the pen at Al, who caught it easily.

“You haven’t spoken since when, Christmas?”

James looked at the card. “Last summer.”

“Seriously?” Al fell back to the couch beside him. “You haven’t talked to Lil since the Gala? Are you serious?”

“She hasn’t talked to me, either.” James turned to look at Al. “If I’m ignoring her, then she’s also ignoring me.”

“You guys take dysfunctional to a whole other level.”

“No fucking shit. But what’re we supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, treat each other like you like each other? It’s not like you don’t.”

“It’s complicated, though. You admit that.”

“Yeah. I know it is. But it’s also doesn’t have to be _that_ complicated. You make it worse by not talking to each other.” He stretched his feet out and shrugged. “Here’s the thing. Eventually you’re going to have to go to another family event. Imagine what it’ll be like to see Lil again, after having not spoken to her in however long. If we see her this summer, then it’ll be a year. If we wait until Christmas, a year and a half. Can you even imagine how weird that’ll be?”

“And it’ll be less weird if we’re—I mean, if we were together the way we’re meant to be, don’t you think that would be weirder?”

Al turned to face James. He had started using a hair smoothing potion recently, and a section of shiny dark hair slid over his forehead as he tilted his head. “Do you actually think that? That you’re meant to be with each other?”

James looked at his hands. “I…don’t know, Al. I know what Mum and Dad said, and I know what Lily’s said and what Teddy’s said and what I’ve said, even, about it not needing to mean anything. We’ve all said that—fuck, you’ve said it, and as far as I can see you don’t have any reason to avoid fate the way we do. But even though I know, I do know, that it’s just writing on our skin—well, it’s like—we grew up believing that it meant something. I’ve been trying to forget that for a long time. But don’t you think sometimes—what’s the point, if it doesn’t mean anything? Why haven’t we adapted past the marks? Why do we still call them soulmate marks? Why do we support a lie like that, if it is a lie? And then I wonder, what if it’s not, and what if the only way to feel everything we could possibly feel, for me and Lily and Teddy, is to be together? What if we’re limiting ourselves by avoiding each other? And then I wonder—well, what about Uncle Charlie? What about the other people like him? Are they just unable to feel wholly? Or are they the next step, where we all should be? Do they have infinite chances to love people, could they be happier because their future is completely in their hands?”

Al shook his head. “This is what we’re all dealing with, James. You’ve been so inside your own drama—which is significant, I’ll give you that—that you’ve missed what’s going on. Most people our age aren’t going for their soulmates immediately. We’re all wondering if we have to. _I_ don’t think we have to. I think if Uncle Charlie has proved anything, then he has proven that this,” Al tapped against James’s wrist, “isn’t the most important thing in your life. He’s lived a full life, no one’s ever going to deny that. He’s living a full life. So, yeah, it’s a question. Are you meant to be with Lily and Teddy? If you are meant to be with them, is it worth the difficulties of getting there? But those are questions we’re all facing, even if the difficulties of getting with my soulmate are less than yours. I don’t know, James. I think the real question, rather than are you meant to be, is do you want to be? And if you don’t, or if you do, then do you want to sacrifice what relationship you already have with them to get there? Because it seems to me you’ve decided you don’t, and you are. And that’s sad. Because even if you don’t want to be with them—which I would understand, considering—then you shouldn’t want to lose them. And neither of them has asked you to, you know. Neither of them has put out the ultimatum of everything or nothing. So why have you decided those are your options?”

James had sat in silence throughout Al’s speech. He shifted away when Al touched his bracelet, but didn’t say anything. When Al fell silent, James stood, stepped around the table, and looked down at his brother.

“I haven’t decided anything. I’m living my life, Al. I’m not making a statement. I’m not cutting anyone out. When was the last time you talked to Rose?”

“Last week.” Al stood too, crossing his arms. “So your point has not been made.”

“Fine.” James pushed a hand through his hair, throwing it up into spikes. “So you’re able to keep in touch with your friends when you’re in a different country. We’re not the same person, Al. You and me, we behave differently. This isn’t about me and Lily, or me and Teddy, or the three of us, necessarily. It’s about all of us being shit at keeping in touch.”

Al nodded. “Okay,” he said, “all right, so you’re saying it wouldn’t be weird if you went home next week and saw Lily and Teddy. You’re saying everything would be normal.”

“Maybe not normal,” James allowed, “but not end-of-the-world awkward like you seem to think it would be, either.”

“I get that you don’t want to talk about this.” Al held up his hands. “I do, but I want you to think about what I said at some point, all right? Because even if it’s not what you want to hear right now, I think it’s something you’re going to want—or need—to hear at some point. I’ve just said it a bit early, maybe.”

James began pacing in front of the coffee table. “The thing is,” he said, and Al dropped his chin into his hands to watch him, “she’s not even eighteen yet. And when she turns eighteen, will everything be different? Or will nothing be? I can’t tell if I want to stay here yet. I can’t tell what I want, so how could I consider what they want?”  
Al nodded. “That’s the question, I think, that most of us are dealing with. That’s the thing, you know. Where are we going, and who do we want to take with us?”

“And where are they going, and who do they want with them.”

“Yeah,” Al tugged at his ear, “and then there’s that, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading/I hope this is not too ridiculously angsty. (tattooed James though???)


	7. chapter six

Charlie and James were eating dinner together, which their schedules rarely allowed, when the sound of the fire flaring up interrupted their companionable chewing. Charlie raised his eyebrows at James. James set his fork down and stood from the table just as the thump of someone tumbling from the fireplace issued from the living room.

“We should really get a lock put in place,” Charlie muttered, just loud enough for James to hear him as he passed.

Teddy was in the living room. He was running a hand through his hair—light brown, today—and shaking ash from his shirt. He smiled a little sheepishly at James. “Hey.”

“Hi.” James nodded his head toward the kitchen. “We’re just finishing dinner. Do you want to join?”

“I’m all set. I’ll just wait for you.”

“You might as well sit down.” James gestured for Teddy to follow him as he returned to the table. “Lupin’s here to visit,” he told his uncle, taking his seat and kicking out one of the empty chairs for Teddy to sit in.

Charlie nodded. “I can see that. Hi, Ted. How’re you?”

“All right, thanks. Sorry to drop in like this.”

Charlie shrugged. “Not a problem at all. Anything wrong?”

“No, nothing. I just—it’s summer hols. I sort of lost track of time.”

James snorted softly enough that his uncle didn’t say anything.

“I imagine it could get a little disorienting.” Charlie raised his eyebrows at James. James looked at his food.

Charlie asked Teddy about the last year of teaching, and Teddy told them about first years' exploding cauldrons and a group of third years' debilitating shrinking solutions. James tried not to be amused.

After James and Charlie finished eating, James and Teddy cleaned up, and then James suggested, “Let’s go down to the village? You can see Al, too.”

Teddy nodded.

They walked down the path leading out of the reserve, side by side and silent. James slowed his steps to match Teddy’s. He was used to walking here, used to the sights, but Teddy kept glancing up at the dim twilight-struck evergreens towering over them, kept glancing down at the rocks glinting with mica sticking from the dirt path. There were patches of charred plant life visible from here, and every time he noticed one Teddy would inhale.

“I’ve never really thought about how dangerous it is here,” he confessed as they crossed through the gates separating the reserve from the mile of wooded land before the village.

James glanced at him. “It’s not that dangerous. We’re safe.”

“No one controls the dragons,” Teddy said. “You’re not that safe.”

“I haven’t gotten burned yet.” James tried to keep the disappointment from his voice. He failed.

“You want to be?” Teddy sounded incredulous.

“I don’t expect to be burned here.” James shrugged. “Eventually, if I go out researching wilder dragons, outside the preserve, then I probably will. We’re safer here than most researchers are. We have immediate cures; in the wild most people don’t have healers with them, they’ll just treat it, palliatively, until they can get to someone.”

“But you want to be hurt?”

“I don’t want to be hurt.” James shook his head. “I want to have the experiences that might result in me getting hurt. By a dragon,” he clarified.

“Because your experiences with the dragons here are…boring?”

“More boring than I expected them to be. But this wasn’t supposed to be permanent. I don’t know, though, it’s got more staying power than I expected it to. What about you, at the school? Are you going to stay there forever?”

“I don’t know,” Teddy said. “That depends on a lot.”

“Yeah, see. We’ve both got open-ended futures.”

They walked on for a few more minutes, and then, just as the sun had fully set and they’d both pulled out their wands and cast quick Lumos Charms, which could be dispelled easily enough if anyone came upon them, James asked, “Why’d you come?”

Teddy played with his wand, sending its lit tip in dizzying circles through the air. “Because I wanted to talk to you.”

“I sort of got that.”

“Right.” Teddy stopped walking, and James turned to face him. He wouldn’t look at him. “I wanted to tell you about something that happened.”

“Okay.” James bit the inside of his cheek and waited.

“I—Lily and I.” Teddy shook his head. “Before she left for L.A., we.”

“Lily’s in L.A.?” James interrupted. He felt like the world had suddenly gotten larger.

Teddy finally looked at him, eyes wide. “I thought you knew. I thought she, or your parents—are you not talking to her?”

James let out a frustrated breath. “Fuck, no, why does everyone think—we just—it’s not like we’re not talking, we just haven’t been. I’ve been busy, she’s been—in L.A.?”

“She’s with Ris,” Teddy said, like that was an explanation. Which, James supposed, it was to some extent. Ris’s mother lived everywhere but Great Britain.

And then he thought through what Teddy had been saying. His spit went metallic. “You and Lily what, Lupin?”

Teddy dropped his gaze again. “We slept together,” he mumbled, and the words weren’t loud but they sounded loud. They sounded like he shouted them, and James’s head was a canyon to reflect them back, over and over.

“You,” James accused.

“We,” Teddy answered.

“She’s too young,” James said, and Teddy nodded, then shook his head, then shrugged.

“Yes, and no. Two months, and she wouldn’t have been. And you know she’s older than we were at eighteen.”

“Fuck,” James ran a hand over his face. “I don’t,” and then he laughed, harsh and abrupt, “I don’t have any ground to stand on. You and her, it’s,” he rolled his shoulders back, fisted and unfisted his hands, “it’s not my place, is it? I can’t be protective older brother and I can’t be jealous and I can’t say—well, I can. Why didn’t you wait two months?”

“She was leaving. I wasn’t thinking.” He was still speaking to the ground.

“Okay.” James took a couple of deep breaths. “Let’s go see Al.”

Teddy followed James to Al’s flat in silence. He hesitated on the steps outside of the building, rocking back and forth on the pitted concrete.

“What’s the matter?” James wanted to sound exasperated. He just about managed it.

“Al and I.” Teddy stopped himself, shrugged. Took a step toward the door.

James felt a gnawing anger. “What, did you sleep with him, too?”

Teddy turned to look at him, expression wide-open and shocked, and James could have punched him or he could have laughed.

He laughed, a lot. Loud and barely contained, covering his face with his hands and shaking all over. Teddy, after a moment’s surprised silence, joined him.

Albus’s door swung open.

“What the ever-loving fuck is going on. Have you two gone mad?”

“Ages ago,” James answered, barely able to breathe.

Teddy gathered himself together, straightened his back, and looked seriously up at Al. “I hope you don’t mind us barging in.”

“No,” Al said, “not at all.”

James took a few deep breaths and explained, “Lupin just dropped by. I thought we could take him out.”

Albus met James’s gaze. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “I guess we could.” He glanced at Teddy. “Nightlife here is not that thrilling, but it’s probably better than Hogsmeade.”

“Not better than Hogwarts, though.” James elbowed Teddy and finally stepped up into Al’s flat. Teddy followed after a moment. James could still, under the release of his laughter, feel the tension Teddy’s confession had fueled. He hoped Teddy let his guard down, and felt bad that he hoped that, and he hoped that Albus could read his mind.

Almost as soon as they were in the flat, though, Teddy ducked down the hall, and under the sound of the toilet flushing and water running, James twisted Al around from where he was standing on tiptoe, grabbing whisky and vodka from the cabinet over the fridge, and said, their faces an inch apart, “He slept with Lily.”

The firewhisky would have broken all over the floor if James hadn’t been there to catch it.

:::

Albus really fucking loved alcohol. He also, importantly, had really fucking loved it for a long time and, having ended up in toilets at Hogwarts and friends’ places and pubs more times than anyone could count, he felt he had done his time. Point in fact, he _had_ done his time. He was able to drink just about anyone under the table. Lily was always fully gone while he was still stone sober. James was barely any better.

Al’s goal this evening, though, was to get Teddy drunk. He didn’t much care about James. He wanted Teddy to be in pain the next morning.

So he mixed drinks before they left his flat, and when they were out he bought rounds of shots, passing his off on Teddy and, sometimes, James. The treatment may have been rough, but he didn’t much care. The thought of Teddy betraying the trust of Lily having been his student, of Lily having been seventeen, of Lily having been there—and he didn’t know, he told himself, how long it had been going on. But he didn’t think James would have brought Teddy to him if it hadn’t been singular, and if it hadn’t been recent. James would have taken care of it otherwise.

But he couldn’t know, he told himself, and so he helped Teddy get ridiculously drunk.

“I shouldn’t’ve.” Teddy face-planted on Al’s couch.

“ _I_ shouldn’t’ve.” James sprawled on Al’s armchair and covered his face with his hands. “I know better. Everything’s spins.”

“Everything’s dark.” Teddy’s voice was muffled by the cushions.

Al got James some water and some sobering solution. He didn’t give him a full dose, but enough to make sure that his brother wouldn’t be vomiting on the floor by the morning.

He got Teddy the bin from the kitchen and stuck it next to his head. And then he sat on his legs.

Teddy made a pathetic moaning noise. He didn’t try to move.

“What,” Al dug an elbow into Teddy’s spine as he leaned over so he could hiss the words near Teddy’s ear, “are your intentions toward my sister?”

Teddy turned his head so he was facing out. His voice was still nearly incomprehensible as he asserted, “Nothing.”

James was watching them from across the room, resting his water glass against his chin and sipping at the small vial of Sobering Solution. He looked menacing, Al thought, and Teddy twisted his neck so he was almost tucked into his shoulder. Like a sleeping bird. Al shifted more of his weight onto his elbow. Teddy tried to kick, but couldn’t.

“Clearly you have some intentions toward her. James says you slept with her.”

"That was,” Teddy groaned, “inadvisable.”

“Yeah, okay. But it happened?”

“Not thought out. At all.”

“But it happened.” Al pulled his wand from his pocket and pressed it to the angle of Teddy’s jaw, gone soft with his position. Teddy didn’t flinch, but Al wasn’t entirely sure he was aware of what was going on, and so didn’t credit him any points for bravery.

“Just once,” Teddy answered.

“Well that’s good, at least you weren’t an idiot enough to let it happen more than once.” Al shook his head. “You were still an idiot, though. Why not wait a few more months?”

“She was going away.”

“Stupid.” Al took his wand away. “That’s not a good reason.”

“It’s a reason.” Teddy stuffed his face back into the cushion. “Go away please, I want to sleep.”

Al stood up. “We’re not done talking about this.”

Teddy kicked his feet at him.

James followed Al into his room, and neither spoke as they got into his bed, keeping to opposite sides like they had in countless hotel rooms on countless family trips as children.

Al waited until he thought James was mostly asleep, and then he broke the barrier between them, pushing his cold feet against the backs of James’s legs. James let out a shout of surprise, and shivered so aggressively the bedframe shook. Al’s grin, invisible in the dark, was gleeful.

“Bloody fuck,” James hissed, jerking his legs away from Albus’s cold feet. “Bloody fuck. What d’you want?”

“I want to know,” Al turned so he was lying on his back, staring up, “what your intentions are toward my sister.”

James didn’t say anything for a long moment and then he said, again, drawn out, “Bloody fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” Al said, “I know you don’t want to think about it. But really, if you’re jealous of Teddy, does that mean you want to be with Lily? And if you’re jealous of Lily, does that mean you want to be with Teddy? And if both of those things are true, then we should probably have this talk about how you should avoid hurting her.”

“We don’t need to have this talk.”

“I think we do.” Al rolled over and said, right in James’s ear, “You break her heart, I’ll break your face.”

He made it through without laughing, but only just.

James let out an exasperated sigh. “That doesn’t even apply here.”

“It could,” Al argued, “it could, and I expect you to remember it the day it does.”

“Fine, whatever. Can we sleep now?”

“Fine. Whatever.” Al shut his eyes. 

James kicked him a couple of times overnight, but he thought it was probably accidental.

He woke up before James did, and crept from the room to find Teddy heaving into the bin by the couch.

Al went into the kitchen without saying anything, got a glass of water and a vial of hangover potion—one of the last of his Christmas gift from Lily—and then went into the living room, sat cross-legged on the floor by the couch, Vanished what was in the bin, and set the water beside the potion on the floor.

“Please say that’s for me.” Teddy had his eyes squeezed shut. His hair was a sickish green color. His skin was pale and looked clammy. Al wasn’t about to touch him.

“Eventually, maybe.”

“Is this about Lily?” Teddy’s voice was dry.

“Last night you said it was only once and only because she was going away.”

“I did? Well, that’s good, that’s true.” Teddy fumbled out for the bin and pulled it towards his face.

“I’m glad you can’t lie when you’re drunk, that would be inconvenient.” Al swirled the hangover potion in its bottle. “But Lily will probably come back. Does that mean that just-once will turn into more times?”

Teddy shrugged and then winced and then vomited. Al looked at the ceiling until he was done.

“And if it does, what does that mean for James?”

Teddy looked at him, eyes shiny and narrowed, leaking a little. He looked so pathetic Al almost gave him the potion, but he sat his ground. “What does it mean for James?” he repeated, when Teddy didn’t seem about to answer him.

"I don’t even know what James _wants_.”

“Well,” Al considered this, “James doesn’t know what he wants, so that’s understandable. But would you give him the chance to figure it out?”

“We’re not meaning,” Teddy hesitated, looked down, swallowed, and continued, “we weren’t intending to leave him out of anything. This wasn’t about him not being there, or anything. It was just about us, I guess, being there. Lily didn’t want him to know.”

“That’s because Lily’s smarter than either you or James. And is also better at lying.” Al stood. “You can have the potion. Remember to drink all the water, or it won’t stay down.”

Al rubbed at his bracelet as he went into the kitchen to make coffee. He didn’t really think about the initials on his wrist. He didn’t really care about them. Just a mark, he thought.

He didn’t know why the marks on Lily’s and Teddy’s and James’s wrists meant more than his, but they sure as hell seemed to. He thought maybe they wanted it more. It meant more, for them. 

:::

Ris’s mother’s home in L.A. was expansive, in the hills, pool a reflective pocket of sky—much bluer than the sky, if Lily were honest, due to the smog. It was gorgeous and Lily knew, the minute she stepped inside the tiled entranceway, which had potted palms lining one wall and mirrors lining the other, that she was going to need to be dragged away by her hair.

“It’s beautiful.” She turned and stared at the chandelier overhead, which was tropically rustic, and Ris caught her by the arm as she nearly knocked into an oversized vase sitting on a table by the door.

“Isn’t it?” Ris led her from the entranceway, down a breezeway, to an oversized, many-arched house. “This is our place. Mum says we can stay as long as we want; she’ll be busy working on the set design, we’ll just need to stay out of her hair. Which should not be a challenge.” She tugged aside some gauzy curtains and the view shocked Lily to stillness.

“It’s fucking magnificent,” she finally managed.

“I know.” Ris’s smile was smug. “It’s heaven.”

“I’m never leaving.”

“Fine by me.” Ris threw herself onto the white sofa. “That way I can stay forever, too.”

:::

Dom’s birthday fell in early August, when the air hung heavy, hot and humid. The crowd at the Burrow was boisterous, overly energetic for the heat, and Teddy was either thrilled or dismayed to be in the middle of it all again. He couldn’t quite tell what he was feeling. He couldn’t relax.

Fred was there, fresh on a new position at the Ministry, dress robes pressed and starched, drawing compliments from Percy and thinly veiled mockery from Roxy and Molly. Louis appeared late, a few pens tucked in the pockets of his ripped jeans and his bag overflowing with books. Teddy overheard him moaning to Victoire about how behind he was on research for his thesis, and Victoire just patted his head and said, “You’ve got years, yet, Lou, and it’s Dom’s _birthday_.” Louis rolled his eyes, but after Dom had handed him a few cups of punch—heavily spiked by George initially and later, Teddy had seen, by Hugo—Louis seemed much more relaxed.

James and Al and Charlie had all come in from Romania, Charlie joining Ginny as soon as he arrived, leaning against the wide trunk of a tree arching over the edge of the garden and leaning close to say something that made her beam at him.

Al and James attracted flocks of their cousins at the center of the garden. Al kept forcing James to pull up his shirt and show off the dragon across his shoulder, claws gleaming over skin that Teddy could not stand to stare at anymore. Even without his excessive removal of James’s shirt, Al’s handiwork was on display. Since Teddy had last seen them in June, James had gotten a lion inked up his shin, its tail twisting down around his ankle, the golden tuft sitting on his foot, the open roar of its red mouth and white teeth and the artful mess of its mane all over his knee.

Ginny looked gleeful every time her eyes set on the tattoos. Harry covered his mouth whenever Al tugged at James’s shirt, hiding a laugh. Their grandmother sucked on her lower lip. She confided to Teddy, softly, as he helped her carry a large cake decorated in yellow daisies out to the table in the garden, “I know it’s impressive it’s just,” she shook her head, steadying Teddy’s hand beneath the cake dish, “Albus’s artwork was so beautiful on canvas.”

Teddy gave her a one armed hug. He didn’t tell her he thought tattoo ink on James’s skin was a better medium than oils on canvas. He just said, “I bet Al’ll go back to paints eventually.”

Molly patted a hand against his back, directing him to the garden. “I don’t know,” she said, “he seems happy enough. I suppose I can’t complain. Although,” and she opened the screen door for Teddy, “I don’t understand why none of you have settled down. Nearly all of my children were married by the time they were your age.” She didn't look across the garden at Charlie, who was at Ron's shoulder and laughing. He hoped she wasn't disappointed for Charlie. 

“We’re all happy enough,” he told her.

“I know.” She shook her head. “I just worry sometimes. It’s in my nature.”

“As long as you know we’re all okay.” Teddy smiled. “Let’s get this cake out there. I’m sure Dom’s dying for it.”

After cake and gifts, the garden was lit with fairy lights, and the adults—Teddy refused to think of himself as an adult, or any one of his pseudo-cousins—were all sitting near the yellow-lit screen door, talking softly.

Dom and Albus and Molly were swooping about on old brooms they’d found in the shed. Al’s jerked out of his control and deposited him practically in Lucy’s lap, and James poured some punch over his head as he pushed up to his feet, laughing.

Rose picked up the broom and kicked off, and Teddy watched as her silhouette flung itself against the moon. He heard Dom’s shout from somewhere above, and Molly’s laugh, and Louis knocked against his side, drawing him into his conversation with Roxy and Fred.

"What were you up to this summer, Ted?” Fred asked.

“Not much,” Teddy answered. “Mostly some research or brewing for the Ministry, just freelance stuff. Hogwarts will be starting again soon enough.” 

“And no Weasleys or Potters there, for the first time _ever_.” Hugo appeared at Teddy’s side, throwing an arm around Teddy’s shoulder. Teddy forced himself not to shift away. He had only had the younger set of Potters and Weasleys in his classes, but adjusting to life outside of Hogwarts had been weird for each of them. Remembering that Teddy was not their professor had taken little effort for Rose or James, James because he had fled the country, and Rose because she was never perturbed by anything. Relationships shifted and she shifted with them. Albus hadn’t respected Teddy even when he had been at Hogwarts, so he didn’t treat him any differently—well, he had gotten him drunk, but Teddy tried not to remember that. Which wasn’t difficult, seeing as how he didn’t remember much.

Lily was unlike everyone else

Hugo, though—this arm around Teddy’s shoulder felt forced and awkward, and he stayed still beneath it because it was obvious that Hugo was trying. They’d figure it out eventually.

“It’ll be a change,” Teddy said, “That’s for sure. I won’t have to be careful about who I give detention to, just in case my godfather shows up in my office to talk to me about fair treatment.”

“He never.” Roxy laughed, pushing dark clouds of hair over her shoulder as Vic came up behind her, leaning her chin on Roxy’s shoulder.

“He didn’t,” Vic confirmed. “Teddy’s just kidding.”

“I don’t know, I never tried. The things Lily and James got away with.” Teddy shook his head. “Anyone else would have been in detention for months.

Hugo removed his arm to rub the back of his neck, and Teddy breathed out. “Speaking of Lil,” Fred said, “has anyone heard from her recently?”

Teddy stopped breathing again. Hugo shot a glance his way, but no one else seemed to notice.

“I got a text the other day.” Louis pulled a Muggle phone from the pocket of his robes, and Teddy took a step forward. Louis looked up at him. “Do you seriously not have one of these yet, Ted? They’re super useful. I can’t believe more wizards don’t have them. Everyone’s fucking stuck in, like, the middle ages.”

“It wouldn’t work at Hogwarts,” Teddy pointed out. “The headmistress has anti-wireless charms all over the place. Doesn’t want phones to be a distraction. Not like there aren’t enough distractions already.”

“Really, Ted, you have such little faith in the creativity of your students. Get one, it’ll work. I can’t imagine being without one,” Vic said. “The Magical Wireless Network is pretty good. It’s got nothing on Muggle networks, of course, but it doesn’t react to magic, really.”

“I’ll think about it,” Teddy said.

“But Teddy’s luddite-ness aside, what did Lily say?” Hugo asked. “She hasn’t responded to any of my texts in ages.”

"Just said she was out on a hike and saw a rattlesnake. She sent me a picture.” Louis held out the phone, and on its lit screen was a picture of a coiled snake, its tail a blur of motion. “She said she didn’t get bit,” he said, when Vic gasped.

“Well, that’s good. Glad to see she’s keeping herself in one piece.” Hugo sounded bitter.

“Why hasn’t she talked to you?” Roxy tugged her phone from her pocket. “Do you want me to harass her? Have you heard from Ris, at least?”

Hugo shook his head. “Nah, I think it’s the time difference and stuff? I don’t know, it’s not a big deal. They asked me to go with them, I should’ve, I guess.”

“But don’t you like your new job?” Rose appeared at Hugo’s shoulder.

"It’s good, it is. I like the kids, and it’s fun, doing English with them. Plus, Rome is amazing. It’d better if Ris and Lily were actually communicating, though.”

“Well, don’t take it personally.” Louis shook his head. “You know Lil, she’d lose touch with her hand if it weren’t on her arm.”

“What is that?” Roxy snorted. “That’s a _terrible_ saying.”

“It’s not a saying,” Louis protested, “it’s a fact.”

Hugo looked up at Teddy. “ _You_ haven’t heard from her, have you?”

Teddy blinked. He tried breathing, tried nonchalance. “No,” he claimed. “Why would I have?”

“I don’t know.” Hugo scuffed his foot over the grass. “She’s always been weird about you.”

“Weird how?” Teddy asked, too curious to stop himself.

Louis rolled his eyes. “Weird like hero worship.”

“Hey,” Vic elbowed him, “It’s been years since that was the case.”

“Still, though,” Roxy was grinning, “remember that summer she got Luce to charm her hair blue so it’d be like Teddy’s?”

“She looked adorable,” Vic laughed. “Tiny freckled Lily with red eyebrows and all this blue hair.”

"Her mum loved it,” Hugo confided. Teddy felt as if he had swallowed his tongue. “Her dad wasn’t as big of a fan, although he let her keep it for a couple of days. It was when she started begging to get it charmed green that he put his foot down.”

“When,” he coughed, “when was this? I don’t remember.”

Vic tilted her head. “When were you wearing your hair blue all the time? End of Hogwarts, wasn’t it? So Lil would have been six, seven. She was adorable.”

“No one told me,” Teddy said. He wasn’t sure what he would have done. Lily as a child barely featured in his memory. She had been too young, all along.

“Yeah, well,” Rosy crossed her arms, “we didn’t want you to get too big a head. Anyway, she got over it.”

“Yeah, I guess she did,” Hugo said, “but she was still weird about you. Are you sure you haven’t heard from her?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” Teddy liked the trying-to-be-friendly Hugo better than this one, this one who pushed. “Besides, if you want to talk to her, why don’t you just call her?”

Hugo rubbed his nose. “Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to interrupt whatever she’s up to.”

“She’s your best friend.” Roxy told him, “Call her.”

“Yeah, all right. Sure.”

Teddy didn’t think Hugo meant it. But really, he couldn’t blame him. He was afraid of what Lily could do, too.

:::

Bill handed Charlie a bottle of beer, dripping condensation, and hopped up onto the falling-down rock wall at the edge of the garden.

“All right?” Bill asked.

Charlie held the bottle loosely in his hand, gently around its neck, and shifted a little so Bill could fit more comfortably between him and the trunk of a tree that grew up through the stones of the wall. “Yeah,” Charlie said. “All right.”

“Mum keeps saying she wants you to come home.” Bill waited a few seconds before speaking.

“She does,” Charlie acknowledged. “She’s been saying that for years.”

“Are you going to?”

“Have I ever said I want to?”

Bill shook his head. “I did,” he pointed out.

“Different lives,” Charlie replied. “Besides, why would I come back now? I’ve got more family there than I ever have.”

Bill nodded. “Yeah, but they’re not going to stay forever.”

“Probably not.”

“But you are?”

“Probably.” Charlie took a drink. “I like it there. I liked it before James started working for us and before Al showed up, and I’ll like it after they leave. You know I like it. You know I like my job and the people I work with. I know Mum put you up to this.” Bill made a sound of protest, but Charlie shook his head. “No, I know she did. But I’m happy, and I’m not lonely, and I don’t care if you want to keep convincing me that I should come home, you go right ahead, but you should remember that I’m not unhappy.”

Bill let Charlie’s words sit between them for a while. He seemed to be digesting them, and adjusting his stance. “And Al and James? They’re happy? Ginny’s thrilled, you know, that they’re there with you.”

"Yeah.” Charlie shrugged. “I suppose they’re both in weird places. But they seem happy. James is good with the dragons—really good, actually. I hope if he leaves Romania that he doesn’t leave the job. He’s made for it. And Al, well, you’ve seen. He’s good. Ioana—his boss—she loves him, tells me every time I go into the village.”

“I’ve seen,” Bill acknowledged. “Those Potter kids,” he said.

"No odder than yours,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, well. They grew up in this family, didn’t they? Couldn’t have hoped for normal.”

“None of us would have wanted normal.” Charlie smiled. “Not for any of them.”

“No, I don’t suppose we would have.”

:::

James stood off by himself at the front of the house. Everyone was still in the garden, or cleaning in the kitchen. Teddy hesitated by the side of the Burrow before approaching him.

He stopped to stand beside him, facing down the rambling front lawn toward the road, what seemed  miles away in the dark. He could just make out the shed to the side of the drive.

“Hey,” Teddy said.

James glanced over at him. “Hi.”

“James,” Teddy said. “I think this isn’t working.”

“What’s ‘this’?”

“Ignoring each other, or whatever we’re doing. Not treating each other like we matter.”

“Do we matter? To each other, I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, so.” James turned to face him. “How do you want us to change?”

“Let’s just,” Teddy was going to say something mature and reserved and sensible. Instead he leaned forward and kissed James, their mouths quick against each other before James pulled back.

“That’s not anything,” James said. “I’ve done that with no one. You’ve done that with no one.”

“I know, I know that.” Teddy touched his mouth, the phantom touch of James’s mouth there. “But we’re not no one. Let’s just, I meant to say, let’s just get to know each other.”

“Yeah? And you want to, like this?” And James kissed him again, a challenge in the hard pressure of his teeth behind his lips. Teddy knew that he should pull away, that to win the challenge required moderation. But he kissed James back.

And kept kissing him. 

“I’m staying in London,” Teddy told James, between kisses.

James said something into his mouth. He couldn’t make it out.

“Come back with me?”

James pulled back enough to say, “Yeah,” and Teddy didn’t care if one of them lost the challenge, if both of them did. He closed his eyes and Disapparated them both.

He had brought them to his bedroom because yes, it was presumptuous, but James had somehow gotten both his hands beneath Teddy’s shirt when they were locked in no-space, and his fingers pressed against Teddy’s skin like they never could or would leave it. He had reason for his presumption. And so he pushed James backwards, until his knees hit the bed and he fell onto it, bringing Teddy down with him.

:::

"Have you seen James?” Hugo asked Al, “Or Teddy?”

Almost everyone had left. Hugo and Al were staying at the Burrow overnight, neither having been interested in the long and lasting pressure of international Apparation or the struggle of international Floo after such a long day.

Hugo had found Al sitting on a wobbly chair that had been abandoned at the edge of the garden, dropped by someone in the process of returning it to the house. He stood in front of Al and looked down, unable to see much in the dark. There was a glint off the plastic lens of Al’s glasses from the lights in the kitchen.

“Not in a while,” Al said, and something about his tone made Hugo suspicious.

“Is there something going on there?”

Al looked up at Hugo. “I don’t know. I never know. There might be, there might not be.”

Hugo looked up at the sky. The stars were out, scattered bright and madly. He thought about divination and how Lily had loved it, strangely, because it involved so few of the immediate results potions allowed her.

“I thought he and Lily,” he started, “at the end of school—I’m pretty sure there was something there.” He’d been holding it to his chest all summer, how he’d gone down to the Slytherin dormitory the last morning at Hogwarts and had seen Lily hurrying from the corridor leading to Teddy’s rooms, looking messy and tired, and how he had turned heel and run. He’d met Lily and Ris and the rest in the Great Hall later, and everything was normal, too normal for the day it was.

“Were you?” Al didn’t even tilt his head to try to look at him. The light off his glasses remained steady. He was not interested.

Too disinterested. Hugo understood Potter dissembling. He had been raised alongside it.

He was also no good at it.

“I’m not trying to pry,” well, only a little, maybe, “I’m just worried. Did Lily leave because of him?”

“No,” Al said, tone snappish. “Lily’s fine. James is fine. Teddy is fine. They all,” he looked down, “well, maybe they don’t know what they’re doing in a large sense. But they know what they’re doing in a now sense. And that’ll have to do.” He stretched his arms back over his head, “Besides, Hugo, it doesn’t involve us. Plus,” he added, voice dropping, “I gave them all a talk about it a while ago. Believe me, they’ll be careful.”

“Will they?” Al was not the scariest Potter, although Hugo thought he could be if he put his mind to it.

“Oh yes.” Al’s teeth flashed white. “Come on, Hugo, let’s go in. Stop worrying,” Hugo got an elbow in his gut, “it’s not attractive. Besides, just call Lily if you’re so concerned.”

He would, he told himself. Absolutely.

The next day. He’d call her.

:::

 It was completely different than being with Lily. It was harder and angrier and somehow, even with that, less of a fight. With James, everything fell to pieces.

Not bad pieces, not that at all. He just felt completely emptied out, wholly wrecked, and James’s leg was still stuck between his. He had sprawled, starfish like, and his limbs were everywhere and unavoidable. And Teddy didn’t mind. He felt like he had just been dropped from the top of the Astronomy Tower and still he thought maybe he was the happiest he’d been in months.

Comparing them was useless, of course, and unavoidable. He couldn’t put one above the other, but they were so different from each other. He wanted to tell James that, because the breadth of his feeling—that it encompassed both James, with his edges and blunt nails and easy way of breaking, and Lily, whose hands hand been soft and whose lips had been soft and whose hips had not been all that hard, either, but Lily whose very presence had drowned him slowly, drowned him while he fought it—that his emotions covered all that meant, _obviously_ , that he was pre-formed to work with both of them.

But he couldn’t say that, because James was looking at him out of eyes very like Lily’s, and also because James didn’t want to hear about Lily right now. Right now was the aftermath of Teddy having lost a challenge, or perhaps James having lost it, or perhaps both of them having lost it, and it was stupid to want to kiss him again and to stay in bed for days.

It was really stupid.

“This is really stupid.” James sounded too content to be distressed, which was exactly how Teddy was feeling. Like if he didn’t feel so loose-limbed and buoyantly empty he’d be extremely upset.

Teddy kissed him. “Very stupid,” he agreed, when their lips separated again.

“We can’t just,” James said, and Teddy shook his head, sending his hair into an arc of static over the fuzzy cotton of his pillowcase. 

“Maybe we could,” Teddy suggested.

“I live in Romania,” James pointed out, “you live at Hogwarts,” which made things awkward, Teddy readily admitted. James’s breaths came heavy and fast in the silence between them. He was waiting, and James was waiting, and one of them had to say it. “And Lily’s in the States.” James, finally, admitted it.

“We could figure something out,” Teddy said. “There are dragons everywhere, aren’t there? There are schools and teenagers in need of potions teachers everywhere, aren’t there?”

“So you think we should run away?” James asked.

Teddy rolled onto his back. “I don’t think we should do anything right now,” he told the lamplight glowing orange on his ceiling. “But I think we could, at some point.”

“Run away?” James said again.

“Do something,” Teddy clarified, but not by much. The future had always looked huge. It was starting to look a lot brighter.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be quite honest, I don't even know what's going on anymore. I hope those of you who're reading this are enjoying it. End point = someday. (These characters just like to spin wheels, and I apparently can't stop them.)


	8. chapter seven

Charlie was standing in front of the fireplace when James stumbled out of it the next morning. Charlie looked at James, shook his head, and said, “One of the dragons is missing. We need to go look for it. Are you ready for a day off the ground?”

James rubbed one fist against his grainy eyes. “Which dragon?” he asked through a yawn.

“The female Ridgeback. No one’s seen her in three days. It’s time to start a search party. Will you be okay to go?”

James knew that if he said no his uncle would never let him live it down, and neither would his coworkers. So he nodded, chugged a cup of lukewarm coffee, and jogged down to the broom shed to meet up with Yvonne and Claire, who were leading the party.

They didn’t find her that day, and camped out for the evening. They didn’t find her the next, either, and by the time they did, several hundred miles beyond the limits of the preserve and nearly into Bulgaria, the night in London seemed a very distant memory.

So James was surprised to come home to see a pile of letters on his bed. His uncle asked, “Did you adopt a pen-pal while you were home?” and James laughed but wondered.

Most of the letters were from Teddy. Chatty things about his day, his research, the people he saw in the coffee shops. One a day, every day since James had left London. Five of them.

The sixth letter was from Darren. He and his first soulmate had found their second. She was, he said, lovely and kind and very unhappily married.

He didn’t know what to do. He actually said: _I do not know what to do._

James didn’t know what to tell him. He wouldn’t have known what to do either. If someone were making Lily unhappy, well—but he couldn’t think of it like that, because that was different. Wasn’t it?

James stared at the pile of Teddy’s messages for a long time before pulling out a scrap of paper and beginning his response. He told Teddy about the search for the Ridgeback, how it’d taken ten of them to stun her and seven to levitate her up into the night, above the clouds, and how cold it had been, and how funny it had been, to see this terrifying creature hanging among a flock of people on broomsticks.

He sent his letter off with the most recent owl to come with Teddy’s, and, as an afterthought, scribbled his phone number along the seam of the envelope. _Just in case you decide to get out of the Middle Ages_ , he added.

And then he texted Lily.

:::

The message from James came through at ten in the morning. Lily looked at her phone where it lay on the bedside table and squinted through her headache at the name on the screen. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them wider to read it again, and then flopped her arm over until she took hold of her phone and dragged it onto the bed beside her head.

She swiped her finger across the screen, tapped in her unlock code without looking at it, and squinted to read James’s text. _How’s Hollywood?_

That’s all it said. Definitely not worth moving for.

She turned onto her other side and closed her eyes, determined to get at least ten hours of sleep. She still had six to go.

:::

Teddy got a phone. He dragged Dom to the store with him, and she made fun of him throughout the whole process, but he walked out with a fancy new phone which, the witch who sold it to him had told him, would work within the Hogwarts walls if he cast a certain charm on it. The directions for the charm, she told him, were stored beneath the plastic of the box the phone came in.

“It’s quite simple,” she smiled through red-glossed lips, “I hear it’s a Ravenclaw invention. It’s come in very useful over the last few years.”

Dom bumped her arm against Teddy’s and said, “Welcome to the real world,” when they exited the shop.

“Who d’you think invented that charm?” he asked. What he was really wondering was whether he should tell one of the older professors about it. It would benefit him, of course, but did he want to deal with classes full of students on their phones?

Dom rolled her eyes. “They’ve been using it for at least three years, Teddy. If you haven’t noticed, it probably means that they’re not using their phones in class, yeah?”

“Right.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at the icon for contacts. “Can I have your number?” he asked, and felt immediately stupid.

Dom shook her head. “You’re the weirdest person,” but she told him, and showed him how to send a text, and then dragged him to get drinks. He wanted to go home and find the envelope with James’s number scribbled on it so he could ask him about the dragon immediately. But he drank a couple of beers with Dom, and some of her friends came in, and Vic, and by the time he got home he’d almost managed to forget about James.

Almost. He did send a quick, _Hey, it’s Teddy_ , text, though.

:::

James had included her in a group message with an unknown number. Lily looked at the text messages lighting up her screen, stumbled sidewise into Ris, who balanced her with a hand on her hip, and shook her head. “My brother’s an idiot,” she informed the world at large, which included Ris, Timur, Luis, and Maria, all of whom were as drunk as Lily and sticky with sweat from the club. They stood on the street outside it, beneath yellow lights and the slowly changing traffic signals, and Lily tried to read the messages on her phone.

“Why’s he an idiot?” Maria asked. Her father was directing the movie Ris’s mum was working on. Luis was her twin, and Timur was their friend from college, visiting for the summer. Luis and Maria were both obsessed with him. They wore green and yellow bracelets around their wrists; Timur had his soulmate mark on display, the initials _OL_ and an arrow that pointed steadily east.

“He’s just,” Lily held her phone up in front of her face and skimmed. She picked out key phrases. _Hogwarts_ , _Romania_ , _Potions_ …and she got it, "an absolute prat.”

Ris bumped against her side. “Hey, we came out for fried food. Let’s get fried food.”

“A grilled cheese sounds like the only good thing left in the world.” Luis wrapped one hand around Lily’s wrist and drew her phone away from her face. “Come on, come on. Let’s get food.”

Lily followed. She sat in the red plastic of a diner booth and downed water and fries and ate half of Luis’s grilled cheese, and then half of his half, so he ordered another, and she didn’t look at her phone again until she was in her bed at Ris’s mum’s, and the sun was coming up, all red out the window.

She typed, _Teddy finally joined us Muggles? Hurray for communication._ And then she went to sleep.

:::

It was Lily’s eighteenth birthday. James wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be doing about it. He had sent her a text, and Teddy had, too, in the group message chain that was surprisingly active most days, although a bit lagged due to the time differences.

James thought about texting Teddy and asking if he was going to do anything. He couldn’t imagine what Teddy would do. They couldn’t just show up there, uninvited. It was the States, for one thing, and their border control was fairly stringent. It was California, for another, which was not a straight-through Floo ride, and the thought of Apparating there made James’s joints ache.

He wanted to see Lily, he thought, but he was also worried about what seeing Lily would mean.

He was sitting on the steps to the broom shed, playing with his bracelet, and thinking about whether it would be better to be with Lily or without her when Al came walking up.

He dropped to the pine-covered ground beside the steps, elbowed James in the thigh, and asked, “You thinking of going to see her?”

James nodded. “I won’t, though.”

“Yeah,” Al admitted, “logistically it’s a little hard. Would probably take more than an hour or two to arrange.”

“I mean, could I Apparate there?”

“It’s a very long distance,” Al said, which was true. He drew a line across his neck.

“Yeah, I know. Splinching is possible.”

“Likely,” Al coughed. “Besides, has Lily said anything about wanting to see you?”

“She’s eighteen,” James protested.

“You didn’t want to see her when you were. You didn’t want to see Teddy.”

“Yeah, but this is different. We all know, it’s more—more normal.”

Al’s quickly suppressed grin was gleeful. “Well, if you want to,” he looked at James out of the corner of his eye, “I know someone who monitors international Floo. She’s got a faster option. If you get to London I bet you could take it. I’ll let her know you’re coming.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Al pushed to his feet. “Just get to the Leaky Cauldron. Evie’ll take care of you.”

James thought about it for less than a minute. “All right,” he agreed. “I’ll do it.”

He texted Teddy before he stepped into the green flames flooding his fireplace. _Are you around? I’m going to see Lily. Meet me at the Leaky by ten if you can._

Teddy wasn’t there when James arrived in London, though. Al’s friend was, a tiny witch with short blonde hair, silver rings through her nose and eyebrows, and a wicked red smile.

“We’ve got to wait a bit,” she told James when he slid into a table across from her, “the Ministry’s still shipping people overseas. I don’t like to interfere with their movements. They tend to get picky about it.”

“How illegal is this?” James asked.

Evie signaled to a passing waiter and pushed a mostly full pint of beer across the table to James. “Oh,” she said, “just a little. Don’t worry, people rarely get caught with me.”

James took a sip of the drink. It was light, some sort of IPA, but with an unexpected burn when he swallowed. He coughed, and Evie, taking a second glass from the waiter with a smile, said, “Good, isn’t it?”

James nodded in agreement, unable to speak.

“So Al said there might be someone else coming. Is there? Because he’ll need to get here by eleven. It’ll be about six when you get to New Jersey and…what, California? With the time difference and travel time, I’d say you’ll get there by nine.”

“Where’ll I end up?”

“In New Jersey my friend Elle’ll meet you. Then it’ll be Matt in L.A. He’ll get you connected to wherever you want to go when you get there. He’s a good bloke.”

“Good.” James tried the drink again. He swallowed faster, and the burn felt less like fire. He wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or not.

“Your friend, though?” Evie prompted. “Will he be coming?”

James pushed himself up a little in the seat to pull his phone out. He lit up the screen. No messages.

“I’ll just call him. Give me a minute.”

He ducked out to the front of the pub, listening to the ringing of his phone and watching Muggles hurry past, eyes skipping over the shabby front of the building behind him.

“Yeah?” Teddy's voice was gruff at his ear.

“Hey,” James said, “did you get my text?”

“No,” Teddy bit the word off, “I was in a staff meeting. I haven’t had a chance to look at my phone—I just saw the light in my bag and Binns was going on so—good timing. Anyway,” Teddy let out a breath, “what’s up?”

“I’m going to see Lily. Any chance you’ll get out of the meeting in time to get to London before eleven?”

Teddy was silent for a few minutes. “How?” he asked eventually.

“How’m I going to see Lily? Floo. Albus.”

“Oh, of course, Floo and Al. How else?” Teddy’s voice was low. James thought he probably didn’t want a response. “Look, James. I don’t know if I can get there in time, but I’ve got a meeting tomorrow with the Ministry about some of the stuff I’ve done this summer. So I don’t think—you go. Tell her I said hi. I should get going, though, I’ve got, I mean, you know. Binns won’t notice, but the others will.”

“Sure,” James said, but Teddy had already hung up.

He looked at his phone, shook his head, and went back inside the pub to join Evie.

Sometime after ten, Evie stood up from her table, having downed more glasses of beer than James had been able to keep track of, and led the way through the back door, into Diagon Alley, and up a back staircase to a flat over a shop selling used broomsticks.

“Well,” she gestured at her fireplace, which took up a whole wall of the front room of the narrow flat. “There we are. I think you know how to do it?”

“Where am I going?”

“Just say Elle’s house, that’ll do.”

“Right.”

Evie set a fire, James tossed in a handful of Floo Powder, stepped into the flames, and said, “Elle’s house.” Everything blurred. He shut his eyes and tucked his elbows against his sides.

:::

“Aren’t you going to look?” Ris sat on the edge of Lily’s chair and tapped the top of her bare foot with a green nail. Lily lifted her sunglasses and pulled her foot away.

“At what?”

“‘ _At what_?’ she asks.” Ris shook her head. “Your mark, obviously.”

Lily shrugged. “Eventually. I don’t care,” she reminded Ris. “Anyway, I like my bracelet.”

“Yes,” Ris rolled her eyes, “it’s very nice. Quite a fashion statement. Well, if you’re not gonna look now or ever or whatever, we should probably get ready for tonight.”

Lily swung her legs from the pool chair and stood, gathering her towel and water bottle as Ris stood, too.

“Where are we going?” Lily asked.

“It’s a surprise,” Ris said. “Luis and Timur have planned it.”

Lily smiled. “Good,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to end up wherever we were the last time you planned something.”

“Hey now,” Ris protested, “it wasn’t that bad.”

“I still have nightmares about how nasty the drinks were. I’m pretty sure there was leftover beer in the bottom of my vodka cranberry.”

The night was like every other night, except Lily had to pay for even fewer drinks than usual, as it was her birthday, and they stayed out even later, and everyone caught hold of her wrist at least once and asked if she was going to take off her bracelet. She pulled her hand away each time.

It was nearly dawn by the time she and Ris were deposited by taxi on the sidewalk outside her mum’s home. Ris was typing in the code to the gate when Lily noticed a figure slumped against the wall, a dark bulk of knapsack beside him. “Hey,” she muttered, grabbing a hold of Ris’s hand, her other hand slipping inside a concealed pocket in her purse and gripping her wand.

Then the figure shifted in sleep, and his head fell in to a pool of light cast by one of the lampposts lining the path beyond the gate. “James?” Lily said. Ris’s hand tightened in hers for a moment before dropping it.

“James, your brother James?”

Lily knelt down in front of him and took his shoulders. She shook him, not very gently. “James?” she said again.

He leapt as much as he could, slumped like he was. His shoulders bumped back against the stone and his head jerked up, his forehead knocking against Lily’s chin.

“Oh,” she said, and rocked back. “Fuck.”

“Lily.” James’s voice was bleary, fuzzy. “Happy birthday.”

“It’s not anymore. But thanks.” Lily stood up and held out a hand to James. After she pulled him to his feet he leaned down to swing his bag onto his shoulder.

“Hi, James,” Ris said brightly. “How’s it going?”

James pressed his knuckles into his spine and cracked his back. “All right, you know. A bit sore.”

“You could’ve texted, let us know you were coming,” Lily pointed out. Ris turned and reentered the code, and the gate parted smoothly. “We wouldn’t have stayed out so late. How long were you waiting there?”

James yawned widely, his face creasing. “A while,” he said, when he recovered.

“You idiot,” Lily muttered.

“Where were you, though? It’s basically dawn.”

“It was Lily’s _birthday_ ,” Ris reminded him. “We were out celebrating.”

James cast a glance at Lily. She stared up at the wide white house ahead of them, avoiding his gaze. “Well, come on. You’re staying for a while, aren’t you? You can’t just show up here and then decide to head off right away.”

“I’ve got a couple of days off work,” James said, “so yeah, I’ll stay. If that’s all right,” he added a bit awkwardly to Ris.

“Whatever,” Ris said, “there’s room.” They had skirted around the main house, and were at the front of the pool house. Ris opened the door. “I’m heading to bed. I’ll see you guys whenever.”

“Night,” Lily said.

“And Lily,” Ris stopped at the top of the staircase, which led to her suite of rooms, “happy birthday, really.”

Lily waved a hand up at her, then gestured down the hall. “I’m this way.”

James looked around as they walked to her room. The French doors leading to the pool from the living room were un-curtained, and he let out a breath at the sight of the green glow of the lit up pool.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “Fuck, Lil. You do realize how ridiculous this is?”

“I do,” she acknowledged. “But nice ridiculous? Sort of like you showing up at the gate at five a.m. the day after my birthday.”

“It was more like nine p.m. when I got here.”

“We were out to dinner.” Lily elbowed him. “Why didn’t you text me?”

“No service.” He held out his phone. “I don’t have an American plan.”

“Right.” She pushed open the door to her room. It was a mess, clothes everywhere, shoes in piles by the closet and desk and bed. “Please say you did something for a while, and didn’t just sit there for all that time?”

“Yeah, I went out for food and then wandered around until all the shops closed, and then I got lost. And, you know, made it back eventually. And then slept.”

“What,” Lily dropped her bag on the floor and toed off her heels, kicking them into a pile beside the doors that led to a patio overlooking the pool. “What on earth possessed you?”

James shrugged. “It’s your birthday,” he said to her bare feet, the red tops of her toes where they’d been shoved into her shoes. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“We already know, though. I already know. It’s not the same as you.”

“No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”

“So what are you doing here?”

He sat on the edge of her bed and looked up at her. He was serious, expression drawn. “I didn’t want you to be alone on your birthday,” he said. “That’s not a lie.”

“And?” She prompted. She stepped closer. She meant to step closer. She thought she wanted this, what he was here for, if he was brave enough to admit to it.

He reached out and pressed his fingertips against the inch of skin visible at her hip. She didn’t step away.

“We should talk about it first.” James was looking at his fingers on her skin. She looked down at the top of his head. When he didn’t look up, she knelt slowly, so she could see his eyes. She half expected him to look away. He didn’t. He closed his eyes for a second, but by the time she thought to comment on it they were open again, bright.

“Do you want to, though?” Lily lifted her wrist and tugged the knot of strings loose with her teeth. James watched her.

She shook the bracelet to the floor and held her wrist out between them. The pale strip of skin, with only a few stray freckles, the two sets of initials, the two arrows, the gold glow of the _JP_ , the steadiness of the arrow pointing directly at him.

She looked at him. He stared at her wrist. “Can’t we just, stupid as it sounds, trust this?”

He held his wrist out, and Lily, hand shaking, untied his bracelet. Her and Teddy’s initials sat there, hers gold and his still black, his arrow still, just as his arrow on Lily’s wrist was. Lily wrapped her hand around James’s wrist. He looked up at her again. He leaned forward, and she kissed him.

It was neither as tense nor as exciting as the kiss at the gala the summer before. It was softer, less rushed. It felt less risky.

James sighed when Lily pulled away, and she reached up to touch a spot on his forehead, a wrinkle he got when he was thinking, that she had always wanted to touch but had never felt she was allowed to. It put her wrist right in front of his eyes and he went cross-eyed looking at it. She laughed, and then he laughed, and then they were pressing their foreheads together, and it only took a few inches and re-angling to kiss again.

It was a slippery devastating thing. As James’s tongue pressed against hers, Lily accepted that this, more than anything else that had happened, more than sleeping with Teddy, more than kissing James at the gala, this, her hands on James’s shoulders, and him on her bed, this changed everything.

He pulled away.

“I don’t.” He pushed some of her hair out of her face. His hands were hot on her forehead, cheeks. “I don’t want to rush this.”

She rocked back on her heels. “Are we rushing it? Hasn’t it been coming for years?”

James shook his head and reached out again, thumbs tracing where her eyeliner was smudged beneath her eyes. “No. I haven’t let myself want this, not really, not until recently. And you,” he leaned forward, almost bent in half, so his forehead could rest against hers. She didn’t mind the pressure; she maybe minded what it meant. “You? You’ve been,” he snorted, breath washing over Lily’s mouth, and she knew she just had that in her mouth but wrinkled her nose anyway, “you’ve been _stoic_ about all this. But it had to have been traumatic, when you found out. Wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Lily said. “I didn’t really let myself think about it. And then when I did, I was…yes.” James’s face was a pale freckly blur; she shut her eyes. “Yeah, maybe it was a little traumatic. It definitely changed things. But it isn’t like—I didn’t spend my life wishing I didn’t know about it. It wasn’t the kind of trauma that ruins a person. It was just, well, what it was. I think it was good for me.”

“To know?” he asked. “All along, even when we were little?"

Lily nodded, her forehead moved his. “I didn’t have much time to dream of that future, you know, the one with your perfect soulmate, eternal love and happiness, no one ever fights or hurts each other and everything’s easy?”

“Ah, yes, _that_ future.” James drew away. When Lily opened her eyes, she caught the tail end of a smirk on his lips.

“Shut up, you know people talk about it like that. And then they get disillusioned and it’s _awful._ They run off to study dragons, they lock themselves in school dungeons. But I was already disillusioned.”

James rolled his eyes. “We weren’t heartbroken, or anything, Lil.”

“Weren’t you?” Lily asked. “A little bit.”

He rolled his lips together. “We aren’t talking about me though. We’re talking about…”

“Me?” Lily asked. “I’m okay. I’ve been working on it for a long time.”

“So if we were to,” he shook his head, “if we did anything tonight, you’d be okay with that?”

“Well,” Lily shrugged, “within reason. I mean, Teddy and I have,” she watched him closely, to see if that surprised him. It didn’t. “You and Teddy have,” she continued, and _that_ surprised him.

“He talked to you about that?”

“He sent me a letter.” Which had been both cowardly and old-fashioned, but Lily hadn’t been angry. She had assumed, anyway, when they both started texting her. “And you can’t be upset, because he talked to you about me.”

“And I was upset,” James confessed. “I don’t want,” he took a fistful of his hair, “I really don’t want to fuck anything up.”

“James.” Lily reached up and touched his mouth. “Everything’s already fucked up. I say we run with it.”

His lips tensed. Thoughtful, kissing her fingertips. She dropped her hand after a moment.

“I don’t want to wait forever,” he told her. “I don’t even want to wait a week, or _days_ , or anything. Just. Not tonight? Okay. We’re gross and tired and I’ve been sleeping on a street and you,” she knew her makeup was smeared. She had possibly kissed someone, a couple of someones, her hair was knotted on one side of her head, her mouth tasted like someone had tossed some tequila into a load of laundry and let the clothes sit wet overnight. She looked unromantic. But it was _James_.

“You care what I look like?”

His eyes widened. “No. Fuck, Lil, that’s not what I mean. I want this to be—” he caught her jaw in his hands again, drew her mouth to his and kissed her, and then continued, laughing, “I want this to be _sober_.” He rolled his eyes when she opened her mouth to protest that she was exceedingly sober, “Lily, I want this to be sharp. I want us to be awake, okay, and aware. I don’t want us to lose what we’re feeling because it’s six in the morning and we’ve been up almost all night and you’re a little tiny bit drunk and I’m sore and possibly had a few margaritas at some point and I just—Lily. Maybe I’m thinking too much but I just really don’t want to lose _this_ , okay?”

She rocked back on her bare heels. “Okay,” she agreed.

“Okay,” he repeated. “Good.”

“Good. Well.” She pushed to her feet. “I’m going to shower. And brush my teeth. There’s another bathroom by the guest room downstairs if you want.”

“I probably should.” He grabbed his bag and ducked out of her room, not glancing over his shoulder as he disappeared in the dim hall.

He wasn’t back by the time Lily got out of the shower, and didn’t come back before she fell asleep. She woke when the sun was fully up, bright lines peeking through the curtains, and her room was still empty.

She rolled out of bed and down the stairs. The house was quiet.

She paused in the kitchen for a glass of water and a slice of birthday cake leftover from a messy cooking experiment Timur had conducted the day before, then wandered out to the pool. James was floating in the shallow end, limbs skinny and a pale sort of wavy in the blue water.

Lily sat on the edge, swirling her feet through the water. James kept his eyes closed but flopped one arm in her direction and said, “Morning.”

“I think it’s afternoon.” Lily tilted her head back to take in the angle of the sun. “Definitely.”

James splashed in her direction. The water didn’t even threaten to reach her. “Is this really your life now?”

“What?” Lily set her water glass down on the bricks and wiped her chocolate sticky fingers on her pajama shorts.

“This.” James righted himself and walked toward her, slowly through the water. “Going out, waking up after noon, swimming, repeat?”

Lily shrugged. “We have done a lot of that.”

James narrowed his eyes. “Aren’t you bored?”

She kicked her legs up, sending a small tidal wave toward him. He slapped the water down, effectively spattering himself and her with water droplets. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m less bored than I was in school.”

“What’re you waiting for?” he asked, and she looked at him, a long look. She reached out and touched his forehead.

“Nothing. Myself. I don’t know. Let’s go to the beach today.”

He ducked under the water. When he came up he was grinning. “Sure, okay. The beach.”

:::

Somehow, even though technically what James could see of it was probably about the same as what he could see of the Atlantic at home when they went to the coast, the Pacific Ocean gave the impression of being huge. It stretched to the horizon, which was not all that far away, but it just looked like it could eat up the sand and boardwalk, cars and concrete parking lots. Eat up him and Lily, easily.

Lily ran for it, arms out and hair flaming, and hit the water in a flail of limbs and a bright scream. He followed more slowly, letting it chill goose bumps up his thighs as he waded in.

Lily turned to face him, moving slightly as the waves washed against her back. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“It’s cold,” he pointed out. “And the waves are massive.”

“Watch out for undertow.” Lily laughed, and dove, coming up sputtering feet away. Her skin was pale, freckles standing out. She had a strand of seaweed caught in her hair. James couldn’t remember a time when he’d seen her looking happier.

“Come on, come on.” She waved at him. “Come here.”

He knew what was going to happen when he got close enough to kiss. And still, with the sun up and people everywhere, he went.

:::

Teddy tried to think about upcoming classes. About the perseverating done by all the professors at the staff meeting. About everything except James and Lily together, and him apart.

It was a stupid sort of jealousy, one which was not only unfounded but also unfair, because James had invited him, and Lily hadn’t asked either of them. No one had chosen favorites, in this strange situation they had going on. He kept reminding himself of that. No one had picked favorites.

But when Lily sent him a photo of her and James, their faces pressed together, a hot sun sending mountainous shadows from their ordinarily smallish attractive noses, he poured himself some firewhisky and settled in to brood.

:::

She was sunburned.

At some point, Al had tried to teach her a charm to alleviate sun burns. Whatever it was, it hadn’t stuck. Someone—maybe Ris’s mum, probably not—had stocked the bathroom near Lily’s room with aloe, and she rubbed it, wincing, on her heated skin.

James might have remembered the charm. She probably could have, should have, asked him. But after they got back from the beach, he had disappeared into the guest bedroom and Lily was worried to break the silence.

She couldn’t tell if the beach had changed anything. She thought maybe he was worried.

Or maybe, she reasoned, as she tugged a brush through her hair and met her reflection’s eyes in the mirror, he was just showering, like she was, because he was covered in sand and salt. And maybe the day hadn’t done anything. And maybe they were the same as they had been the night before. And maybe, with one last aggressive tug of the brush, maybe she needed to stop thinking so much.

He was in her room when she came out of the bathroom, sitting on her bed, shoulders tight to his neck. He was looking at the floor. He was trying not to look self-conscious and, to Lily, anyway, failing.

“Do you remember the charm Al taught us, the sunburn one?”

James glanced up at her. “Yeah, of course. Do you,” his eyes widened, “you do.”

“I do what?” She rocked back on her heels, against the shut door of the bathroom.

“Need the charm. Badly.”

“It sure feels like it.”

He stood and came toward her. “Here.” He turned her around with a slight pressure to her side, then pressed his wand against the bare skin of her shoulder. He murmured a word, and Lily felt an instant cooling sensation over her shoulder blades and down her back beneath her tank-top.

James kissed her shoulder as he touched the wand to her temple, and the same calm feeling spread over her cheeks and the curves of her ears and neck.

“Better?” he asked, mouth still against her skin.

“Much.” She nodded, stared down her legs at her bare feet. Both of his hands were on her waist. “Is this,” she started, then shook her head.

He turned her, gripping with his hands and then releasing her as she faced him. “Sharper?” he finished.

She nodded, feeling shaky and small and not at all brazen, the way she had with Teddy, the way she had that morning, when James had shown up.

“I think so,” he answered, and then he untied her bracelet and she, after a messy pause, took his wrist in both her hands and undid his.

Neither of them looked at the bared skin; they’d done enough of that the morning before. James led Lily backwards to the bed and she, still terrified, no longer hesitant, pushed him back onto it with a flat pressure to his shoulders.

Undressing James, it was some sort of heady dream. Her hands fumbling at the hem of his t-shirt, fingers finally riding up over his skin, finally able to trace the edges of the dragon tattoo over his shoulder. He shivered as she leaned in close, eye to eye with Al’s creation, and kissed the trail of flame furling from its sharp-toothed mouth.

“I’ve been _dying_ ,” Lily told him, climbing onto the bed after him, her legs on either side of his, “over that.”

He raised his eyebrows, his hands on her skin, now, hot lines under her shirt. “You have?”

“You can’t know,” her voice muffled by hair and shirt as James pulled it over her head, "but it’s been slowly killing me.”

He pulled her down, kissing her until she nearly forgot to breathe. He loved her, she realized, her hands and his everywhere.

“I love you, too,” she told the lion on his knee as she pulled his shorts over it, and James’s answering laugh was bright and breathless.

:::

Teddy was sitting at the desk in his living room, trying to plan a lesson for the first class of the year, which happened to be NEWT level, when there was a knock at the door. He grimaced at his scribbled notes, tossed back the last of the coffee in the mug by his elbow, which had gone cold, and, when the knock repeated, called, “Coming.”

James was standing in his doorway. His face was dark with freckles, his eyes bloodshot, his hair a mess. He looked wrecked and exhausted, but he was grinning.

Teddy stepped aside to let him in, and didn’t ask what he meant when James said, “You know, Teddy, I think we could do it.”


	9. chapter eight

Albus was bored.

He loved his job. He loved his boss. He loved his uncle. James was all right when he wasn’t being an enormous prat.

But sending James off to see Lily via Evie in London had reminded Al that he hadn’t always spent his evenings drinking calm beers with his brother, or, alternatively, sketching in his boss’s office, or, most frequently, reading his uncle’s detective novels until one or two in the morning, falling asleep with his chin on the pages. He used to have a very vibrant life, full of friends who specialized in breaking rules and having a mostly illegal type of fun.

And, okay. Maybe that was painting too rosy a picture of it. He had hated London, much of the time. He’d hated his job. So so much, he had hated it. He’d hated fighting with Rose over how much money he had. He’d hated fighting with Rose over how much he was going out and how bad his friends were for him. He’d hated admitting, a little bit, inside of himself, that Rose was perhaps right about his drunken nights and the possibility that his friends were maybe not the best people.

But they were fun.

And anyway, the point, Albus considered, as he hole-punched a sheet of paper to add to Ioana’s design book, was not that his friends in London were better than his friends in Romania.

The point was that he had had friends in London.

Here he had Charlie and James and was sometimes invited to spend time with their friends, which was nice, but still. They were all dragon handlers, and he was decidedly outside of that group. He had Ioana, who was invaluable as a boss, of course, but was not exactly a friend.

So maybe he was lonely, too. Lonely and bored.

“Are you all right?” Ioana was at his shoulder.

He jumped an inch and glanced at her, eyebrows raised.

Ioana tapped the paper in front of him. “You’ve had that punched for a minute or so, but you haven’t done anything with it.”

“Just,” Al flicked open the binder and struggled the page onto the rings. His spacing on the holes hadn’t been quite right. “We haven’t had anyone come in in a while.”

“It’s a slow season,” Ioana acknowledged. “We have those.”

“You used to run this place by yourself.”

“I did.” She pulled a stool out from beneath the counter with one foot and perched on it, taking her glasses off and setting them on the counter. She fixed Albus with a serious stare. “Is this you telling me you’re leaving, Albus?”

“It’s me,” he rubbed his nose, “not knowing.”

She nodded. “I thought you might be making this decision soon.”

He looked at his feet. The relaxed spread of her expression made him feel ridiculously predictable.

“May I ask you a couple of questions?” She was examining him like he was an open palm and she was a seer. He didn't really think she needed to ask any questions. It seemed to him she knew everything already.

But, “Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”

“Why did you come here?”

He glanced up at her. “Didn’t we,” but her raised eyebrows made him stop, reconsider. “I think I came here because I didn’t know what else to do and,” it sounded self-righteous to admit it, but he was starting to think maybe it was true, “I think I mostly came for James.”

Ioana smiled. “And now you think James doesn’t need you anymore?”

“Well,” Al shrugged, “yeah, I mean, he’s talking about leaving too, isn’t he?”

“Which leads to my second question: Are you thinking about going because James is thinking about going?”

“Would that be such a bad thing? I came here at least partly for him, so would it be bad if I left when he left? It’s not like I’d follow him to the Hebrides or Iceland or wherever they’re thinking of sending him. I’d just…go.”

“And my third question,” Ioana seemed gleeful that the conversation was falling so cleanly into her thought process, “where will you go?”

“Home, I guess.”

“To your parents?”

Albus shook his head, abrupt and sharp. “London.”

Ioana clapped her hands together. “Good. You think some more about this, and if you decide that you do want to go back, tell me right away. I have some friends, I will talk to them and see if anyone’s looking for an apprentice.”

Albus straightened. He could feel color threatening to flood his face. “You don’t have to,” he began, but Ioana shook her head.

“Don’t pretend with me, Albus. I want to help you, and you want me to,” she narrowed her eyes at him, “you _expect_ me to. And the truth is, you would be wrong not to. Of course I will do this for you, and you do not need to protest.” She stepped from the stool and added, a grin softening the words, “Don’t I know by now that you’re not polite?”

Albus shut the book of tattoo designs and smiled down at it.

:::

Teddy didn't like that the group message chain was full of James.

_There’re a few openings studying dragons in other places. I’ve been talking to people at work about it and it sounds like a real possibility. Wild dragons, like I’ve been wanting to do for a while._

Lily had sent a thumbs up emoji.

Teddy had said, _That’s awesome. Where?_

Scotland, apparently, Iceland, Norway, Italy. Teddy’s screen filled with countries, possibilities.

Lily sent an emoji of a dragon and then one of a globe. Teddy could not figure out what was going through her head. She’d been oddly incommunicative ever since James had visited. Teddy had texted James separately, not long after he’d left Hogwarts the night he returned from L.A., to ask what was going on, and James had responded, _She was fine when I was there. Maybe she’s second-guessing? I’ll check with her._ But whether he had, and whether he had found anything out, Teddy didn’t know. James hadn’t said anything else, and Teddy had deleted their message chain because it was embarrassing that he hadn’t just asked Lily himself. And now it felt too late, with her seeming so passive aggressive.

James kept talking about the positions he could take. When even Teddy wasn’t responding quickly, because in the face of Lily’s shortness it was difficult to summon up proper levels of excitement, James kept going, sending pictures of the different compounds or cottages or flats that he could stay in, diagrams of the different dragons he’d be studying.

Lily once responded with a list of healing charms, which she must have lifted off of Albus at some point, and James was silent for a day or so, but he started up again soon enough.

The thought of it did excite Teddy. He wasn’t going to deny that. He was just very worried over what Lily was thinking.

And what if it was just him and James, during Hogwarts holidays, in the Hebrides or Tuscany or wherever, just him and James banging around a flat, making coffee and eating pasta and arguing over whether the Weird Sisters or Skivy Skeletons had done more for modern rock.

They certainly wouldn’t have had that last conversation if Lily were there.

The thought of him and James, the two of them—it should have been what Teddy was used to. But the message chain felt awfully loose, empty, without Lily’s usual comments.

There was too much space without her, he thought. In text messages, in flats in Florence, in cottages in the Hebrides.

She needed to be feeling the way James claimed she had when he went to see her.

And so Teddy swallowed his embarrassment and texted her. _Are you okay?_

:::

Ris got very extraordinarily drunk on her eighteenth birthday, which fell only six days after Lily’s. This closeness in age was one of the reasons they’d become friends early on at Hogwarts; they’d been among the youngest and smallest in their year, which had resulted in them being the subject of not infrequent teasing.

Early in the evening of her eighteenth birthday, Ris took her third tequila shot, tossed aside a messily sucked slice of lime, and undid the bracelet on her wrist.

She held it up in front of her face and squinted.

“DR,” she said, voice happy. “Anyone know a DR?”

Timur made a face. “I do, but he’s an ass.”

“Better not be him, then,” Ris laughed, and Maria changed the song, and Lily poured more shots, and they got on with their night.

It wasn’t until they were stumbling back up the lane to the pool house—well, Ris was stumbling. Lily was more sober than usual—that Ris said, “Lily, I am going to make you so mad at me.”

“Impossible,” Lily said, although it probably was possible. She tightened her grip on Ris’s hand and redirected her a little. “What do you think is going to make me mad?”

“I need,” Ris said, “to tell you something.”

“Right.” Lily led Ris through the entranceway to the pool, pushed her gently down on a lounge chair and sat across from her. “I guessed that.”

“Why’re you always so,” Ris slurred, and then shook her head, hair swaying, “what I mean, what I want to say, is—you’re always so sure! Why’re you always so sure? You don’t want to go looking for your soul mate so you don’t even _look_ , I mean. Have you ever taken off your bracelet? Do you even have—do you have a heart?”

Lily thought maybe she had been quick to tell Ris she wouldn’t make her mad. If things continued like this, then, maybe.

“Of course I do.”

“Have you looked?”

Lily wondered if Ris would remember this conversation in the morning. Could she tell her the truth, or part of the truth, or should she have told her some of it a while ago?

“I,” she began, but Ris interrupted her.

“Because I know I told you I was good with this, this, whatever. Whatever we’re doing—not settling down, like you said, except we are. We are so settled. This whole summer has been one long—like we’re old women, Lily. Okay. We are old.”

“You’re drunk,” Lily said. Not to discredit her argument so much as to provide evidence against it. “Old women don’t often get drunk.”

“Sure they do,” Ris said, “and anyway, that’s not the point really. The point is we’re being boring and you can’t deny it because I know you believe it too. This isn’t,” Ris shook her head, “we’re not out changing the world—not that I want to be but,” she breathed, and Lily saw in astonishment that Ris’s eyes were teary, “I’ve never kissed anyone, Lily. I’ve never really wanted to—I’ve been, not saving myself,” her tone went hard, sardonic, slightly belied by the sheen to her eyes, “not at all, but I’ve always thought—well, would it be worth it, until I met that person? When I was little, I mean, and then Hogwarts was full of—just, no one. I wanted it to be _someone_ , okay? And it’s fine for you, you don’t care about this shit. You tried so hard to prove you didn’t, with Sebastian and then everyone else and—whatever. It’s fine for you. And I thought maybe, maybe whatever you had planned would be better than—well. Lily. I want something to change, okay? And this,” she pressed her hand around her bare wrist; she’d never replaced her bracelet, Lily should have known. She should have suspected, because she should have known Ris well enough. “This could be that. I want, I just want someone, all right?”

“Okay,” Lily told her. “Of course it’s okay.”

“Of course?” Ris wiped at her eyes, smearing angry smudges of eyeliner and mascara across her cheeks. “Why is that an of course?”

“I never wanted to force you to run away with me,” because, of course that’s what it had been. “I just assumed you meant that you wanted to.”

Ris shrugged. “I thought I did but,” she held out her arms, “this summer has seemed very long and very empty, hasn’t it? Like it was fun, it was, for most of it, but it’s almost over and then we don’t go back to school or anything and I just—there has to be more, all right?”

“You don’t need to,” Lily turned to look at the pool, “you really don’t need to keep defending yourself. I get it, Ris. Okay? It’s fine. I’m sorry I ever made you think… I don’t know. That this was something I required of my friends, or whatever.”

“That’s not what I _meant_.”

“It’s fine,” Lily said again. “Look, let’s just,” she was still staring at the pool. “Let’s just go for a swim, and then go to bed, and then tomorrow we’ll figure out how to get you back to the UK so you can find your soulmate, all right?”

“That’s not,” Ris began, but Lily was already kicking off her shoes and running toward the pool. Ris followed seconds later.

:::

_I’m fine_ , Lily sent Teddy a couple of days after his text to her. _Everything’s fine._

_Sounds like it_.

_Don’t be rude_ , she said, _it’s unattractive_.

_Just trying to match your usual tone_.

_Oh ho ho. Aren’t we full of ourselves_

_Lily. What is going on_

_Nothing, I told you. I’m fine. I’m going to Rome._

Teddy stared at his phone. Shook it. The words didn’t change.

_?????_

_To see Hugo._

_Oh. And then?_

_Hold your hippogriffs._

Teddy dropped the phone to his desk and let his head follow a second later. He didn’t understand her at all.

:::

Hugo stopped when he saw Lily sitting on a bench on the sidewalk outside of his flat. He rested a hand on the shoulders of each of the children he was looking after—Bice and Nico—and propelled them toward their front door. “Let’s go up,” he said. “Get you started on your homework.” He ignored Lily, who called his name only once as he passed. 

He checked to make sure the children's mother was home before heading back downstairs and out to the sidewalk.

Lily watched him walk towards her. She smiled at him, lifted one hand in a stilted wave.

“So you do still exist.” Hugo stood in front of her. Her expression didn’t seem sheepish as she looked up at him. He wanted her to feel guilty, believed he deserved that, at least.

“You could have called, too. That’s not all on me,” Lily pointed out, and there was the fault in his anger.

“I didn’t want to bother you and Ris and whatever you were doing.”

Lily rolled her eyes. “Come on, Hugo, you know us better than that. Anyway, I’m here now.”

“Yeah,” Hugo agreed, “and that’s odd. What’re you doing here? L.A. get boring?”

Lily blushed, then, so quickly Hugo almost missed it. “Ris moved to Edinburgh.”

“So,” Hugo drew the word out. “So you’re just traveling around, friend-hopping? Ris kicks you out, so you move on to me?”

Lily’s eyes widened. Hugo crossed his arms and rocked back on his heels. He pushed down on the guilt. Maybe that had been unkind, but it wasn’t like it wasn’t true.

“That’s unfair,” Lily finally said.

“No, I don’t think it is. What are you doing here, Lily? Really?”

“I missed you,” she said, “I did. And Ris didn’t kick me out. I could’ve stayed with her, I could’ve, but I have missed you.” She stood, pressing a hand to her mouth. Speaking through her fingers, she said, “Hugo, it’s only been two months. We have gone summers without talking before.”

Hugo wished this wasn’t true, because it gave Lily some leverage, and he didn’t think she deserved any. “Sure we have,” he started out agreeable, “but we always knew that at the end of summer there’d be school, and then we’d be seeing each other every day. We could catch up in September. But when were you planning on seeing me again this time? When Ris got bored and moved home?”

“I didn’t have a plan,” Lily admitted. She wouldn’t look at him; he tried to find some strength in this, in making her feel guilty. “But it wasn’t like I wasn’t ever going to see you again.”

“That’s not the point.” Hugo reached out and took her shoulders. “It’s that you didn’t care enough to think. We were best friends, weren’t we? But we’re also cousins, and so I’m—dispensable?”

“Not at all,” Lily told him. “Never.”

Lily Potter, like her brothers, was not a bad liar. But Hugo still knew her. What he thought, but was not sure, was that she believed that the fact of their distance was always negated by the fact that they were cousins. She could do anything, and he was required, by blood, or love, or history, or all of that, to be there for her. And Hugo knew that if this was the way Lily thought, which seemed likely, then the reverse was true. He could do anything to her, and she, because Lily strived at nothing like she strived at not being a hypocrite, was required to be there for him.

The truth of this inversion didn’t make the last two months any easier on Hugo. He wanted to be mad at her, knew, in fact, that he had a right to that anger, but also knew that she would let him be mad at her, would let him ream her out, and then would expect everything to be normal. Because in Lily’s head, that was how these things worked.

But he wasn’t sure of normal, anymore. Two months wasn’t a long time at all, but two months of silence and then her, here? That gave a sharp edge to all the time and the distance.

“I’ve got to work,” Hugo told her. “I’ve got to get the kids dinner and help with their homework and get them to bed. Do you have somewhere you can go? I could meet you for a drink after nine.”

She crossed her arms, shook her head. “Yeah, I mean…yeah. Okay. Where do you want to meet?”

He told her about his second favorite bar, two blocks down, and then went back upstairs to where the kids were both, amazingly, sitting with their school books piled in front of them.

It wasn’t until they had each completed an assignment for one of their classes that they asked, “That was Lily Potter  out there, wasn’t it, your cousin?” and Hugo understood they expected a reward.

“It was,” he said.

“Why didn’t you bring her up?” Bice was pouting. Hugo tapped her forehead.

“Because I thought your mum might not appreciate a stranger in your house.”

“She’s not a stranger,” Nico protested.

“Not to me,” Hugo said, “but to you. Don’t worry, you’ve met me. She’s no more thrilling than I am.”

“But she’s _famous_ ,” Bice said, and Hugo shook his head.

“Just barely,” he muttered, and then he pushed the maths textbook toward Bice and said, “I think you’ve got some more of this to do, don’t you.”

Bice stuck her tongue out at him, but she did open her textbook.

Lily was waiting for him at an empty table in the corner of the bar. He ordered his drink before going over to her.

“Hi.” She pulled her half-full glass away from him as he sat down, making room on the table.

“Hi.” He looked at her. She was tired and freckled, darker than he’d ever seen her. She looked like his cousin, and she wasn’t looking at him like she’d forgotten him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “about what I said earlier. I was maybe a little harsh.” Even as he spoke he felt his chest caving in. He hadn’t wanted to be weak. Lily may have been a self-revolving force, but he couldn’t’ forget that she’d always been. It was hard to blame a person for not changing when you hadn’t either.

“No,” she tugged on her hair, “you were right. I am sorry I didn’t call at all, or text, or write or anything. I’m sorry I showed up here without any warning at all.”

He shrugged. “It is nice to see you.” He took a drink. “Just, what are you doing, Lil? Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I’m just,” she began, and Hugo could see what she was going to say, _having fun_ , _figuring it out_ , _hanging around, living_ —everything she used to say at school, everything that used to make her sound so mature. She bit her lip instead.  

Hugo blew out a breath. “You see, don’t you, that whatever you were doing in L.A.—going out, hanging out, meeting people—that that was fine, but it wasn’t—you weren’t—was it what you wanted?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“I’m really sorry, I am, it’s just you always sounded like you did in school. You sounded so confident.”

“I couldn’t just say that I didn’t want to do anything,” she pointed out. “I had to act confident. Don’t you know what everyone would have said to me? If I had said I was—am, whatever—completely clueless? They’d have said I couldn’t be. They’d have had suggestions and suggestions and they’d have said, you know, just go out and get what you want. You’re Lily Potter. They’d have said that over and over and I…L.A. was easy.”

“So you were running away, then? From making decisions?”

Lily glanced at him. “You’re fishing, Hugo. What are you looking for.”

Hugo rubbed his nose. “Al said something to me once. He said you all knew what you were doing. But it seems to me, if you’re running, then they should be running with you. Or, if you’re running from them, then you should be running to something.” Lily opened her mouth, then closed it. “It’s not,” Hugo explained, “something we need to talk about. But now, Lil. I just want to know—is this running, this not knowing what to do, is this you waiting for them?” He reached across the table and tapped her bracelet. “You always said, in school, you said you didn’t care. But after Al talked to me, I wondered if you didn’t care, or if you thought you couldn’t, or if you did and you just…I don’t know. I just want to know, is this you waiting?”

“I’m not,” she said, “I’m really not _waiting_.”

“Sure, okay,” he agreed. “I believe you, I do, but then—why aren’t you trying, Lil? If you’re not waiting for them, why aren’t you trying to figure shit out?”

“Because,” she started, then shook her head.

“All I’m saying,” Hugo told her, “is that you sure seem like you’ve put your life on pause for them. And I want you to think about that. That’s all I’m saying.”

“It’s not _for them_ ,” Lily spat, finally. “It’s _for me_. They say this too—everyone who knows thinks it’s about them. It’s not, all right. I meant it when I said _this_ ,” she gripped her bracelet, “is not the most important thing. Sure, it’s important. Sure, it’s been—it’s been a lot, okay, I have spent a lot of my life thinking about it, talking about it,” she looked at him, eyes wicked, “acting on it—but it’s not what’s got me stalled right now. You think I don’t know? You think I’m not jealous of you here with your kids, of Ris and her new job, of Al being a genius and Rose being a genius and Teddy being _amazing_ and James running away and falling into _that_ , into dragons? You think it doesn’t eat me up that all of you have figured something out, at least a little bit? And me? I’m still fifteen, I swear. I have not paused my life for them, Hugo. I’ve paused my life because I have no clue where I want it to go.”

She breathed out, loud, and Hugo took a drink.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when he swallowed. “I guess I don’t understand where you’re coming from.”

“Of course you don’t,” the words were harsh, but Lily’s tone was calmer. “You’re good at stuff, Hugo, real life things, and I’m just—clueless,” she said again. Then she laughed, “Sorry, I honestly did not come here to whine at you.”

“But,” Hugo shook his head, “you are good at things, Lil.”

“I know I am, I know. You don’t have to tell me. That’s what people will say, you know? Here are the things you’re good at; pick one; turn it into a career; you’re _Lily Potter_ , it can’t be that hard.” She took a sip, made a face, set the glass on the table. “But the thing is, the future is so big and I don’t, I really just don’t know, okay?”

Hugo bit down on everything he wanted to say. She should have the whole world, he wanted to tell her, and he knew that that would not help at all.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me get you a better drink, and then you can tell me about this summer, all right?”

She smiled at him. Soft, easier than he was used to seeing from her.

:::

Ginny told Lily that of course she was welcome at home. Lily hadn’t wanted to come back to her parents’ house; she had gone through all of her options: James was still in Romania, planning but not yet gone, and besides, that step was possibly too big of one to take yet; Albus had moved to London and was living in a tiny studio that did not even have a couch; Rose had moved in with three girls in Glasgow and she’d _said_ it would be fine if Lily crashed for a while but she didn’t think it really would be; Ris had offered her her couch, but Lily felt suddenly uncomfortably aware of how much she had relied on Ris over the years; Teddy was at Hogwarts, and, besides, like James, staying with him would have meant too much. She had no independent income, and wasn't so close to her other cousins that she could stay with them without paying rent. She hadn’t spoken to most of her friends since school.

So she went home.

Her parents were happy to have her there, planning dinner around her and talking positively about all different sorts of jobs they thought she’d be good at. When her mum suggested broomstick repair, Lily locked herself in her bedroom for two days. She had barely even _liked_ flying.

She came downstairs one Saturday morning in early November to find Teddy sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee with her dad and looking much more relaxed than she would have expected him to, if someone had suggested the scene to her the day before.

She poured herself a cup of coffee after saying, “Morning,” to the two of them, and then hesitated before pulling out a chair at the table and sitting, resting her cup against her chin.

“Do you think that’s a smart move?” Harry asked, continuing, Lily assumed, the conversation they’d been having before she arrived.

“I don’t really see a drawback.” Teddy wasn’t meeting her father’s eyes. “It’ll look good, it’ll be a good experience, I can stay with James so I’ll be saving money.” Lily kept staring at him, but she didn’t miss the way her dad shifted in his seat at that. James and Teddy had been talking a lot in the group message about moving in together over Christmas holidays, while James worked on dragons on Lewis and Harris and Teddy took a position teaching an adult education course at one of the local schools. She hadn’t expected Teddy to discuss the move with her father.

“It’ll only be for a month, won’t it?” and both of them turned to look at her, Teddy registering slight surprise, her father blinking. “What harm could it do?”

“A month could do a lot,” her dad said, “although it does seem like a good opportunity. I’d say wait to see how James settles in, though, before you decide.”

“I have to let them know by next week.”

“Well, then. Wait a week,” Harry smiled. “Although James seems to be enjoying it so far, so I suppose you won't have to worry about him being in a mood or quitting before you get there.”

“He does, doesn’t he?” Teddy grinned. “He seems so obsessed with the dragons up there. I wonder if he’ll ever leave.”

Lily bit on her lip. She’d been wondering the same thing, although not with as much optimism as Teddy seemed to have.

“He didn’t answer me when I asked whether the position was temporary,” Harry said. He stood and went to the sink, rinsing his cup and placing it on the counter. “Ginny’s trying to de-gnome the garden; I’m going to check on how that’s going. Come say bye before you leave, all right, Ted?”

Teddy said, “Sure, of course,” and he and Lily watched as Harry exited the kitchen, glancing over his shoulder without too much subtlety as he did so.

Lily waited until she saw his head pass the kitchen window before she said, “Do you think he knows anything?”

Teddy shook his head. His foot found hers under the table and she didn’t kick him away. “I think he’s suspicious of something. Not sure he knows what.”

“He sure seemed suspicious of you and James,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, _that_ I think he knows.”

Lily raised an eyebrow. “For any reason?”

“We may or may not have left Dom’s party abruptly this summer. I didn’t think he noticed, but someone did.”

Lily grinned. “Nice. Hugo knew, too.”

“I know, I know.” Teddy stretched his arms over his head. “Reckless, we were reckless. You can yell at us all you want.”

“Hey,” Lily held out her hands, “I was never the cautious one.”

“No.” Teddy tilted his head. “Not to start with, you weren’t.”

Lily drew her foot away from his. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, really. Just that you’ve been silent for months now.”

“Not silent,” Lily protested. “I say things.”

“Okay.” Teddy pulled his phone from his pocket an scrolled down the screen. He held it out to her. “Here James sends a picture of a pretty cool dragon. I say, ‘Awesome, please say you weren’t that close to her. What’re you studying her for?’ James tells me to stop worrying. You send an exclamation point.”

“That’s conversing. You covered everything else.”

“Lily.” Teddy set his phone down. “What is going on?”

“Nothing,” Lily stressed. “Honestly, nothing is going on.”

Teddy glanced over his shoulder at the door, found the kitchen still empty and neither of her parents in sight, and dropped his voice anyway, “James said that he thought we might be able to make this work. Do you disagree with that?”

“I,” Lily looked at Teddy’s hands, where they curved around his nearly empty coffee cup, and she shook her head. “Seriously, Ted, nothing has changed since this summer.”

“Okay, then, maybe not for you. But it has changed for me.”

Lily glanced at him, narrowing her eyes. Her stomach swooped. “You don’t want,” and then she dropped off, because every completion of that question sounded pathetic in her head.

“No, of course I do. But not if you’re not honest with us, Lil. If you can’t tell us the truth, how’re we supposed to make this work? There are going to be a lot of secrets,” he admitted. “I mean _a lot_ , and you know that and I know that and James knows that. But that is one more reason for us to be honest with each other. Because there are going to be very few people we can be honest with.”

“So, what,” Lily asked, “you want us all to be completely honest with each other?”

Teddy’s expression was tight, accusatory. “I thought that’d be obvious. Isn’t that what relationships are?”

Lily stared at him for a moment, and then she started laughing. “You know what,” she said, her laughter dropping into his surprised eyes, “ I don’t know. I have never been able to be 100 percent honest with anyone, have I? Not since,” she touched her wrist. “Well.” And then she looked at the ceiling, remembering Albus crawling into her bed that night, when she was eleven. “There’s Al.”

“And then there was me,” Teddy pointed out. “You could have been honest with me, after I turned eighteen.”

“I could have,” Lily acknowledged, “if you hadn’t shut me and James out and then gone and become a professor, so that any conversation touching on our marks became instantly illegal. Those were pretty serious signs that you didn’t want to be talked to.”

“You still did,” he said, after a moment in which she told herself that his mouth looked pouty and not guilty.

“For James,” she said.  “Who then ran off to Romania. So. Not a whole lot of support on the tell-the-truth front from the two of you.”

“Okay,” Teddy pushed his coffee cup in circles over the tabletop, “I see where you’re coming from. And you know that both James and I are sorry for how we handled…things. But now, Lily, now that we’re all on more or less the same page, maybe now we could be honest with each other?”

“Yeah, you know, I’m not sure we are on the same page. What have you and James planned?”

“You’ve been there,” Teddy held out his phone, “we’ve barely talked outside of the group chain for months, Lil. We’re just going to move in this winter, see how it goes, I’ll go back to Hogwarts for the rest of the school year, maybe figure out something for the summer. Our plans don’t go beyond that. And you know that and I know you know that.”

“And where do I fit?”

“Wherever you want to,” Teddy said it fast, exasperated, “seriously, Lil, wherever,” and then her parents were opening the door, scrubbing their boots over the mat in the doorway and glancing between the two of them.

“Everything okay?” Harry asked, tone cautious but hard-edged.

“Yeah,” Teddy said, “of course.”

The life they’d chosen, Lily wanted Teddy to know, was not going to work well for a bad liar. “I wanted to know if Teddy was ever going to quit his job so I could be potions master.”

Harry and Ginny exchanged glances, which was convenient, because Teddy shot Lily a surprised one of his own.

“You’d have to get an advanced degree first, wouldn’t you?” Ginny asked, resting her elbows on the back of the chair across from Lily.

“Not if Ted left Hogwarts in a lurch and they were desperate. Think of the unqualified teachers you all suffered through.”

Harry shook his head. “I hope the current headmistress would be able to be a bit more choosy than Dumbledore was.”

“Are you saying I wouldn’t make a good professor?”

“Just that you’re a little young,” Harry said. “That’s all.” Although the glance he’d exchanged with Ginny had said much more.

“Well, you’re the ones who wanted me to work in broom repair. At least I’m good at potions.”

“You are,” Teddy corroborated. When Lily’s parents looked at him, he shrugged, “She was the best student I’ve had so far, no contest.”

“That’s kind of you,” Lily told him.

“You sound surprised.” Teddy looked at her. “Honestly? You’re better at potions than I am. I probably _should_ leave Hogwarts so you can teach there. Although the kids would probably all be brewing advanced potions by second year, which is not necessarily a good thing. Imagine a bunch of twelve and thirteen year-olds running around with Felix Felicis or Amortentia.” He shook his head. “Not good.”

“No,” Harry said after a near-painful silence, “I don’t suppose it would be.”

“No,” Teddy agreed, “it wouldn’t.”

“Okay, cool,” Lily pushed back from the table. “Now that we know that Teddy won’t, shockingly, sacrifice his position for me, I’m going to go down to the village and continue my search for work. Want to come?” she tossed at Teddy, grabbing her jacket from the back of a chair and stuffing her feet into the pair of flats she had left by the door the day before.

“Um,” Teddy looked between her and her parents, who were watching with impassive expressions on their faces, “sure.”

Once they were a little ways down the lane, Lily took Teddy’s hand and squeezed her eyes shut. She Apparated them into Albus’s flat, which was empty, as Al worked weekends, and pushed him against the counter that separated the kitchenette from the rest of the room.

“The truth,” Lily told Teddy, with their mouths a centimeter apart, “is that I do not know what I want to do, and it seems like a bad idea to get serious with the two of you when I am still completely lost.”

“But that’s silly,” Teddy said, resting his hands on her hips and leaning slightly toward her, “we wouldn’t stop you from doing what you want.”

She let him kiss her for a while, standing in Albus’s kitchen and feeling as stable as she’d felt since L.A.

“But what if,” she said, eventually pulling away from him, “what if I get stuck?”

Teddy caught the ends of her hair and brushed it against her cheek, looking biting on his lower lip and looking thoughtfully at where her red hair touched her skin. “I have two things to say to that, I guess. First, if you think James and I will let you get stuck, then you are very wrong. We know you like movement, Lily. We know you. Not as well as we could, as we will, if you’ll let us. But we won’t let you get stuck. We’re not going to just _stop_  because we have each other. And second, if you are happy enough that you _want_ to stop? Is that a bad thing, really?”

“I don’t know.” She dropped forward against his shoulder. “Is it?”

“I don’t know either. But maybe we’ll find out.” He wrapped his arms around her. “And if we do, then you’ll at least be happy. And if we don’t, then you won’t be stuck.”

“How d’you know?” she asked.

“Because you’d never let yourself be that unhappy. And we would never ask you to be.”

She nodded, and then repeated, “So where do I fit in your plan, then?”

“Come for Christmas, Lil. Come in the winter. Let’s find out how it works.”

"What if it doesn't work?" she asked. 

"Then we'll know, and we can all stop wondering, can't we?" Teddy kissed the top of her head. "But do you think it won't work, Lily, really?"

"I don't know," she said, "I don't know, but I know I want it to."

"So do I," Teddy said. "So much."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am very very hopeful that the next chapter will be the last one. The characters are going on obnoxiously about happiness, which is usually a pretty good sign that I'm nearing the end of something. (Hooray for repetitive writing.) Hope you all enjoyed.


	10. chapter nine

The girl stopped when she was barely inside the shop. Albus watched her, past the shoulders of the few people flipping through the design books on the counters, over the heads of those slumped in chairs throughout the room.

She stared at him. Her hair was brown, curly, wild. Everything else about her was narrow, from her eyes to her shoulders, and he felt uncertain, pinned by her gaze.

She moved like she knew what she was doing.

He didn’t know what that was until she stood in front of him and held out her wrist between them.

“You were too far away. For so long,” she said, and her voice shook and wormed beneath Albus’s disbelief.

“You’re…?” The letters were there, the arrow, the gold coloring. Still, though. Still.

“Sara. And you’re Albus Potter.” The way she said his name annoyed him. Like this guy in his year at Hogwarts, who used to smirk every time he answered a question correctly. “I told people it would be you. No one believed me.”

Al couldn’t quite believe her.

But the letters were there. “I’m working,” he said, then, realizing that this was something he didn’t get to do over, this meeting of the soulmate, or whatever, “I’m sorry, I just started here. Can we meet after? I get off at five. Let’s get dinner.”

She smiled at him, and his heartbeat quickened, and he was ashamed to acknowledge, even inside his head, that what he felt was fear.

:::

Lily’s parents were waiting for her when she got back from London. They sat in the living room, Ginny reading a book that James had given her for Christmas years ago, on developments in Quidditch over the last five and a half decades, Harry studying a scroll that curled over on itself when a cool breeze accompanied Lily inside.

“You didn’t apply to anything down in the village,” Ginny said, as Lily passed through on her way to the stairs.

She paused. “No,” she admitted.

“Where’d you and Teddy go?” Harry asked, setting the scroll aside. Ginny let her book fall on her lap, and Lily turned back to sit on the couch.

“Al's. He wasn’t in, though, he was working.”

Harry nodded. He and Ginny looked at each other, and Lily waited. There were two directions this conversation could take, and, while neither was ideal, one was significantly worse than the other.

“Have you actually applied to anything?” Harry’s tone was soft, words tentative. Lily breathed out. It was the better of the two options.

Lily shrugged. “A couple of things.” It was not strictly true, but she had looked into applying to several, so she thought that effort was worth some marginal inflation.

“What sorts of things?”

“I don’t know,” Lily said, “you know, restaurant stuff, like I did in summers. I applied to a Muggle library, but—well,” she shrugged, “Hogwarts was hard to explain.”

Harry and Ginny were both holding in laughs, mouths tight. “Lily,” Ginny began, “it’s okay to not know what you want to do.”

Lily waited for the but.

“The thing is, though, we worry that you do have some idea.”

She drew her knees to her chin and asked, sounding far too young, “What am I doing here, then?” She meant to sound confrontational—she meant to _be_ confrontational, in her very person.

“Waiting for something?” Harry suggested, and Lily felt the words heavy in her gut.

“If I’m waiting,” she was so tired of this, “it’s to figure out what to do. So, if you think I know—what do I want to do?”

Ginny, who had never shied away from Lily at her coldest or most fiery, said, “What Teddy was saying today, about potions. You loved potions, didn’t you? Wouldn’t you want to do something with that? Research, brewing, more schooling, Lil—there’s a whole division devoted to it at the Ministry, so many positions. Not so many openings, but—well. I’m sure you could find one. Wouldn’t you want to do something with that?”

Lily stared at her hands because her parents, both of them, silent and anxious Harry, ambitious and straightforward Ginny—they both looked so hopeful. And she had no reason, absolutely none, to poke a hole in that hope. If she were honest, “I would like to do something with potions.”

“Well, then,” Harry looked as if he were about to clap his hands together in relief, “why don’t you?”

“Teddy already does.” It was a childish confession, akin to refusing to order the same meal as someone else in your party when at a restaurant—which was also a thing Lily did—and she was ashamed of it.

Ginny blew out a breath. “Lily, that’s entirely different. Besides, it’s not copying. And plenty of people go into the same business as their family—look at George and Ron.”

As if her uncles’ joke shop would figure into Lily’s reluctance. “I know, there’s that,” she allowed, “but I am also—I love potions making, but what if I did it for my job? Would I love it still?”

Ginny let out an exasperated breath. “A job is not a life sentence.”

Harry steepled his hands beneath his chin and Lily steeled herself. “Don’t get angry,” Harry cautioned, and Lily knew then that this was probably a lost cause, “But you sound afraid, Lil. And there’s nothing to be ashamed of, being afraid, but—those two excuses, and they are excuses,” Ginny nodded and Lily clenched her hands at her stomach, “I’m not trivializing them,” Harry hurried, “but if you’re afraid of not making it, of not succeeding, of not liking it, even that, Lily—well, why don’t you just try? Find something to do with potions and figure out whether it would work. It’s better than staying here and being miserable, don’t you think?”

“After the War,” Ginny said, and Lily dug her nails into her hands because these analogies were always the worst, “Ron was afraid of not being an Auror, even though he didn’t want to be one—we could all see that, you know? But he was afraid of letting Harry down, letting Mum down,” Lily relaxed her hands, “but George needed help, too, and, well, it worked out okay in the end.”

“Ron is happier,” Harry added.

“Ron is alive,” Ginny snorted, a grin flighting across her face, and Lily uncurled from herself, setting her feet on the floor and pressing her palms against the cushions, about to get up.

Ginny caught her before she could leave, though. “Just give it a shot, Lil, okay. Figure something out.”

Lily shrugged. “Yeah, all right.” She knew it was irrational, but she was dying to be walking up the drive outside Ris’s mum’s home in L.A., seeing the sun stain the smog and listening to Timur’s excited post-night-out babble.

Maybe her life hadn’t been anything important this summer, but at least she hadn’t had to face her parents’ expectations.

:::

Darren had sent an owl saying he was in Inverness. James sat at the solid wooden table in the tiny kitchen of his cottage and looked at the letter. The owl, Oliver, sat on the back of one of the four chairs crowded into the space and stared at him, yellow eyes, unsurprisingly, unblinking.

James tapped the page with one calloused fingertip. It was clear Darren wanted to come visit. It was unclear whether his soulmates were with him, or, if they were, if they’d come along. James wasn’t sure how he felt about this. He would like to see Darren. He was certain about that. But he didn’t know what Darren’s letter meant, if it meant anything. He was still unclear as to how they had left things.

No, he wasn’t. Darren had ended things to find his soulmates. Easy. Clear. James’s feelings about the matter aside, it hadn’t been difficult to understand.

And now James’s feelings should have been fully resolved. There were Lily and Teddy, for him. They were coming to stay in two months and Darren was so far out of the picture he was barely—anything.

James flipped the letter over, scribbled on the back page, _Want to come to Harris this weekend?_ and sealed it before holding it out to Oliver, who took it in his talons and winged through the open window.

James closed the swinging glass pane, swallowing his anxiety as the owl disappeared over the water.

:::

There was a photograph of them on the front page of the _Prophet_. It was small, in the lower right corner, a preview of the gossip section. Even in its small scale, though, Albus could tell that his photographed self was not pleased to be sitting at that amber-lit table with the laughing Sara.

The way she was laughing, he thought, sitting on his kitchen counter with the paper pressed nearly to his glasses, was a bit macabre. Overdone. Over and over, her tiny self threw her head back, so her hair tangled wildly out of the frame, and her mouth opened wide, a gaping soundless exclamation.

Across the table he sat stiff, with his shoulders tight, hands in plain view on the table, holding his utensils. Occasionally an uncomfortable smile tensed his mouth.

He hoped that Sara and her friends would not be able to tell how uncomfortable he had been. The caption under the photograph, luckily, just read _Has the middle Potter finally settled down?_

Albus flipped to the gossip section, the front pages of the paper fluttering to the cracked linoleum of his kitchen floor, and read the blurb: _Last night Albus Severus Potter, the middle—and, older issues of this very newspaper would suggest, the wildest—of the Potter children, was seen out with a beautiful brunette. Is True Love in the air? Sources indicate that the lucky lady was not wearing her bracelet, and the initials on her skin matched those of our hero’s son. And, of course, the letters were gold. Will we finally have the celebrity wedding we’ve been waiting for?_

Albus set fire to the paper with his wand, silenced the smoke alarm, and directed the still smoldering ashes to the sink, which he turned on with a jab of his elbow as he hopped from the counter. He wanted to die. He wanted to bury himself in his bed. He wanted to cut his left arm off.

Well, no he didn’t.

He did want to tattoo over the initials on his wrist. Was that possible? Put white skin where they were, claim he didn’t have a mark. A Glamour would have been doable, if he had thought of it earlier. But of course he hadn’t, and Sara had asked to see his wrist the night before, and he hadn’t had a reason to hide it from her.

Except that he didn’t like her very much. That was a reason.

He didn’t know her, either, and there was no reason to dislike her, he reminded himself as he fell into his bed and pulled his pillow over his head.

And besides, the Glamour wouldn’t have proven anything, because she had her mark, and she was not one, he knew already, to be easily dissuaded.

Some time later, there was a crack of Apparation outside his bedroom door.

“Albus.” Rose’s voice, tentative.

He peeked his head from beneath his pillow. She stood in his doorway, hair on top of her head, wearing leggings and an oversized sweater and looking at him through the sad eyes she used to use when she forgot a homework assignment and wanted to copy one of Scorpius’s.

“Albus,” she said again. She came and sat on the edge of his bed and rested her hand on his shoulders, right where they disappeared beneath the pillow. He turned his face into the sheets.

“Is it that obvious?” he said to his mattress.

Rose couldn’t have understood what he said, but she understood his meaning. “You just…did not look happy. I don’t think anyone outside of the family will be able to tell.”

Outside of the family, he knew, and outside of Teddy, outside of Scorpius, outside of Hogwarts professors and classmates and the people he knew growing up, outside of every person any of them saw who asked about Albus, who asked about the picture. He let out a groan.

“Is she that awful, Al?” Rose patted his back loosely.

He turned his head so he was speaking into air rather than cloth and said, “I don’t even know. She might be fine. She might be perfectly nice, I might like her in other circumstances. I might like her in this circumstance in, maybe, say, twenty years.”

Rose said, “Really?” and Al shook his head.

“No, probably not. But I should give her the benefit of the doubt, shouldn’t I? I mean, I’m…I’m supposed to like her, love her, whatever, aren’t I?”

“Maybe, in an isolated world outside of everything else. If all we did was grow up and have babies and raise them to have babies and then die. I don’t know, Al. You know I haven’t gone looking for my soulmate, and she hasn’t come to find me—I don’t know. If she came to find me, would I be happy to see her?”  
“I can tell you I wasn’t,” Al mumbled. He sat up and rested his head against Rose’s shoulder. “And I’m not supposed to feel like that.”

“You can’t help your feelings. You shouldn’t have to.” Rose stood and took Albus by the upper arm. “You’re not working today, are you?”

He shook his head. “Thank God.”

Rose scooped his cellphone from the table by his bed, turned it off, and led him by the hand back into his living room, where she pushed him down onto his bed. “I’m going to make some spiked cider, you are going to sit there, and we are going to watch shit reality shows all day. Okay?”

Albus pulled a ratty blanket from its discarded pile on the floor and wrapped himself in it. “Don’t you have to work?” he called over the metallic sound of Rose getting a pan from beneath his stove.

“I took the day off,” Rose answered, “just in case I needed to protect you from your soulmate.”

Albus shrunk down into his cocoon and turned the TV on from beneath the blanket.

It was nice that Rose was there now, but he wondered if he could convince her to accompany him all the time. Everywhere.

:::

Lily was not comfortable standing where she was. She was not sure what she was doing, and thought it was maybe a stupid thing. It might go down in the infamy of her family’s favorite stories, told and retold at any gathering where things got just a little bit boring.

But she raised her fist and knocked at the door to Louis’s flat, rocking back on her heels as she waited for him to answer.

He did, eventually. He blinked at her. He was wearing glasses and a scarf and sweater set that Lily would have mocked him for endlessly at school. He had on corduroys and was carrying an open laptop in one hand. He raised his red eyebrows at her.

“Yes?” It was a kind enough tone, but Lily knew better than to be tricked by it.

“May I come in?”

Louis glanced over his shoulder. If his flatmates were in, Lily didn’t particularly want to see them, either, but she did want to talk to Louis, and thought that talking to him in the middle of the hallway outside his flat would be no better.

He sighed and stepped back. “Sure.” He led her through the common room, where two of his Muggle flatmates were lying on the couch, bowls of cereal resting on their chests and the TV blaring the news. They glanced up at her and stared as she followed Louis from the room. She crossed her arms, only relaxing when Louis closed the door to his bedroom behind them.

“What’s up?” Louis rested his laptop on his desk. Lily stood in the space between his armchair and his bed and looked at her feet.

“I have a question.”

“I figured as much.” Louis softened a little. “I’m not mad at you for running off to the States and not talking to us, if that’s why you’re being weird.”

“You are mad at me, though,” Lily pointed out.

“No,” he said, “I am confused by you. Like, for example, why are you here right now? You know that it’s difficult to keep my flatmates from getting curious about my background when my family pops in.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Why not text? Or call?”

“It was sort of,” she shrugged, “spur of the moment?”

“Okay,” he allowed, even though it was silly to allow that, that was a blatant and clear lie, “well, you’re here, so what do you want to talk about?”

“You went back to school,” Lily said, “is it weird?”

“You’re not thinking of going to Muggle uni?” Louis’s voice caught with surprise. “No offense, Lil, but I really don’t think—would you be good at hiding magic?”

“Not Muggle school specifically,” Lily clarified, “I was thinking—studying potions, maybe. But I thought, well. Do you think I—I mean…” she trailed off. What she had come here for, she realized, was not something Louis was qualified to give her. She wanted his complete support, but she also, conflictingly, wanted him to tell her she was not cut out to be a student anymore, was not serious enough or focused enough. She wanted him to decide for her.

Louis was watching her. “You know I think that if that’s what you want to do, then you should do it. If it’s not, then don’t.”

Lily bit her lip. Louis had never overstepped the boundaries of his own life. He was the definition of self-control, but had rarely expected his cousins or siblings to behave in any way similar to him, and had never acted disappointed in them. Never acted like he had expectations for them, except that they stay out of his way.

That wasn’t a negative thing, really. It meant that Louis could be a perfectionist and that no one would resent him for it. But at the moment, Lily wanted his perfectionism to touch every adjacent person in his life. She wanted to know the future he envisioned for her, the way she imagined he saw the future, glowing with restricted promise. Not wild or crazy or anything, but settled and steady and cheerful enough.

Louis shook his head. “My suggestion,” the words seemed drawn out of him, slow, “is that you see if you could get into a school for potions, and if you can, then why not give it a shot?”

“Because,” what if she couldn’t get in. The chances of that, she recognized ashamedly, were slim. Her last name would be her passport, if her talent wasn’t, and she did know that she was good at potions. The possibility of her disliking it was a feeble excuse, the same she had used against her parents—if she was really afraid of that, then she shouldn’t even be looking into potions as a career path.

“It’s okay to not want to grow up, you know,” Louis said, slowly. “So long as you don’t let that stop you from doing things you actually like.”

“Of course,” he added, turning back to his desk and tugging out his chair with a foot, “you realize you won’t even be able to start school until next year. January at the earliest, September at the latest. What will you do until then?”  
Lily shrugged. “Go around visiting people?” and even as she said it, she thought of Hugo’s disgusted tone, when she saw him in Rome. But wouldn’t it be different, if she had a goal in mind?

“Or you could work at the Ministry again,” Louis pointed out. “I think Moll successfully covered up the fact that it was you who sneaked in some of the Department of Mysteries’ files a couple of summers ago.”

Lily kept her mouth shut with effort. Louis was grinning at her over his shoulder. “You thought you got away with that on your own? No, Al tipped off Molly, who called in a couple of favors. You could have been in so much trouble.”

“How did Al even know?”

“You used the invisibility cloak. You know how he gets about that when it’s out of his sight.” Louis shrugged. “Anyway, no harm done in the end. Did you find out anything interesting, though?”

“Not really,” Lily hedged. “Nothing.” She wrapped her hand around her wrist and didn’t miss the way Louis’s eyes jagged downward. He shrugged. “Well, if that’s all you came for, Lil, you got my advice.”

She understood this to mean that she could see herself out, but just as she was at the door he added, “Have you talked to Albus recently?”

“No, why?” Lily turned.

“Have you seen the _Prophet_ since Wednesday?”

“Oh, fuck. What has Al done now?”

Louis shook his head. “Nothing, it’s not Albus. It’s,” he rifled through the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a roll of newsprint. He tossed it to Lily, who caught it between her hands. She looked at the front page. There was Al, with a girl’s arms around his neck. The caption? _Potter and soulmate seen out shopping. Already votes are rolling in, granting them the title Most Adorable Couple of the year._

Lily whispered, “Shit. Only since Wednesday, and already…?”

“I know,” Louis agreed. “It’s despicable. And Albus looks miserable.”

He looked a little like he was being strangled. “I need to go see him.”

“Good luck,” Louis turned back to his computer, “he won’t let me or Vic in.”

Lily supposed Al owed her. In this, at least.

:::

Darren came alone. James let him in and they did this awkward hug thing, arms briefly around each other before dropping, and they moved in opposite directions, bumping against each other until Darren burst out laughing.

He covered his face and bent over, nearly wheezing. “Fuck, I thought we left on better terms than this.”

“We did,” James assured him. “We did, I’m just—really very—wow.” And he was laughing, too, the two of them doubled over in the entranceway to his cottage, which was new to him but had leaks in the roof and cracks around the windowpanes, promising indoor flurries in the winter.

Darren finally composed himself. “Why the awkward?” he asked, then, “I’m so glad I didn’t take anyone with me, they’d be convinced I’m still in love with you.”

James swallowed his final laugh, and looked at Darren. Familiar, a little older, a little tanner and with deeper lines around his eyes. It had been, what? Nearly a year, and already there had been so much change.

“Come in.” James gestured, breaking the silence, waved him to the living room with its small overstuffed couch and creaking rocking chair inherited from the previous inhabitants.

They talked around everything, Darren filling James in on his soulmates, on the divorce that had finally been filed for, on how awkward it sometimes was, being the three of them in a world that accepted and acknowledged only pairs. “Mostly it’s okay,” he told James. “Mostly it’s good. Some days, though, we’d like, you know, to hold hands, all of us, without getting weird looks, or to go out together—I just. Well, you know.”

And the way he said it suggested to James that Darren knew what they’d decided, him and Lily and Teddy, even though they’d hardly acted on it yet.

“It can’t be that obvious.”

“Look at where you are,” Darren’s hands took in the bus ride he’d had to take to get here, the two or so miles of walking from the nearest stop, “You’re hiding, but with reason. It’s obvious.”

“Not that obvious,” James protested. “There are dragons out here; I have to be far from people.”

“That explanation will work on anyone who doesn’t know,” Darren allowed. “Me, though? You’re planning. It’s good, James. I’m happy for you.” He looked at his hands, then up at James again. “If things were different, I don’t think we’d have been bad for each other.”

“If neither of us had ever taken off our bracelets,” James admitted, “I don’t think we would have been.”

Darren nodded. “You’ve got to be wondering why I came out here, to visit.”

“Yeah. Although I thought maybe you missed me a little.”

“Of course I miss you, but I could have done without seeing you. I just wanted to know how happy you were.”

“Because,” James prompted, and Darren shrugged.

“It’s funny how knowing that we could have something different,” he brushed at the symbol on his wrist, “made what we did have seem so much less than it was.”

It wasn’t an answer, exactly. But the answer would have left them both culpable, and so, in most ways, it was better than one.

:::

Lily didn’t knock. She Apparated into Al’s bedroom from a back room at the Leaky, landing just to the side of his empty bed.

The flat was silent, but there was a light filtering down the short hall from the living room, so Lily followed it.

Albus was sitting alone on his couch, a book open in his lap. He looked over his shoulder as she walked in.

“I figured it was you.”

“Because no one else would be rude enough to come straight to your bedroom?” Lily sat beside him on the couch. He looked exhausted.

“Got it in one,” Al rested his head back. “Have you finally looked at the _Prophet_ , then?”

“Is she happy being all over the papers?” Lily asked.

“Seems to be.” Al rubbed a hand over his face. “If I could just get to know her, without the press…”

“It wouldn’t be any different, would it?” Lily elbowed him. “You’ve never wanted it, have you? The whole romance, relationship thing?”

Al was silent for what felt like a long time. Lily worried, absently, whether she’d crossed a line. She wouldn’t have thought there were any lines left to cross between them, considering what Albus knew about her.

“I always thought,” Al said, finally, “that when I finally met my soulmate it would be—everything would just click on, you know? Suddenly I’d want all that.” Lily waited, and he continued, “Instead I just feel terrified.”

“Of her?”

Albus looked considering. “Not really. I mean, yes, in a way. What she represents, anyway. Mostly of the possibility that I may never want that. For her, I mostly feel pity.” He shook his head. “She’s dreamed her whole life of this, and she’s stuck with someone who doesn’t want it—to her, it’ll look like I don’t want her. That’s not fair. She deserves the future she imagined, you know?”

“But at what expense, Al?” Lily reached for his hand. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of going along with it?”

“I keep hoping,” Albus told her, “that if I spend more time with her, I’ll grow into it.”

“It’s only been a few days,” Lily allowed, “but do you really think that’s possible?”

Albus shook his head, fast. “It’s awful, Lil. I don’t. I really don’t know what to do.”

“What are your options, really?”

“Fake it until I make it.” He didn’t even sound ironic.

“Which, in this case, is a lifetime spent with a woman you don’t love, in a relationship you didn’t want.”

“Right,” Al sighed. “Well, then, I guess I break her heart.”

Lily squeezed his hand. She looked at the stack of newspapers that were collecting on the coffee table, the _Prophet_ , and some of the even less reputable gossip rags. All of them, she knew without looking, would have a feature on Al and this girl.

“I have a shitty question to ask.”

Al turned to look at her. His eyes were dark, the lamplight throwing more severe shadows over his face. He waited.

“Is she going to take it well? Or is she,” Lily waved at the table, at the magazines and newspapers, “is she into all that?”

“Do I think my soulmate would spread lies about me to the papers? Is that what you’re asking?”

Lily looked at her hands, at her bracelet. She’d never before had occasion to be grateful for the mess of her soulmate marks. But at least she loved James and Teddy. She had never realized that that love was a gift. That love was not guaranteed.

“Yes,” Albus said, “I absolutely do.”

:::

The next time James went into town to do some shopping, he was confronted with a newsstand plastered with his brother’s face. The picture of Albus was trying to hide behind a scarf. It was unsuccessful.

James plucked one of the papers from the stand and skimmed the article. Drivel, all drivel about Albus being too wild to settle down, about him breaking some girl’s heart, about him being perverted. James bit back a wild laugh at that; Albus was the opposite of the person portrayed in this article. He had never been wild the way this article said he was.

James dropped the paper back in the stand, pulled out his phone, and called Al. It went straight to voicemail.

He tried Lily next. She didn’t pick up.

Rose did, her voice quiet. “Hey, hang on a second, I need to go outside.” She hung up on him, and James continued down the street toward to the market, waiting for his phone to light up with Rose’s call.

He ducked into an alleyway between a restaurant and a drugstore when it did.

“Hey,” Rose said, volume normal. “Sorry, I’m at work. Is this about Al?”

“Of course it’s about Al. What the hell is going on?”

So Rose filled James in, told him about Sara, about Al’s reaction. “And of course Al couldn’t take the time to get to know her, really, because he already felt he was leading her on, and so we don’t really know what spurred this,” Rose’s voice was hot with anger, “fucking shit, whether it’s because she’s hurt or because she wants to be famous, and if she can’t use Al the way she planned to, then she can use him like this—we don’t know.”

“Either way,” James said, “it’s a horrible thing to do.”

“Admittedly. It just, it would be slightly more forgivable if it were something she’d feel remorse over later, after she finds someone else.”

“I don’t want to forgive her,” James was seeing red. “Do you, really?”

“Not really. I don’t really want to make her pay, either,” Rose said, cautiously, “this’ll be more likely to die down if we leave it be.”

“I know that,” it didn’t mean that James was happy about it, “does Lily realize that?”

“She hasn’t left Albus’s side since this weekend. She says it’s so she can stop anyone in the press from getting a good photo of him, but I’m pretty sure it’s so she can have first shot at the girl if she shows up.”

“What a mess.”

“I know.” Rose sighed. “Look, I’ve got to go. This won’t last forever, James.”

James listened to the fumbling as Rose hit her screen to hang up, and thought about whether he could do anything.

The only thing he could think of wouldn’t necessarily save Al, but it would fuck up Lily’s and Teddy’s and his lives. So, no. He didn’t really have a solution.

:::

Lily was leaving the tattoo shop where Al worked when a flock of reporters came out from the alleys on either side, flashbulbs brightening the cloudy midafternoon, voices calling over each other.

“What about you, Miss Potter? Are you going to break your soulmate’s heart? Does this run in your family?”

“Why have you never taken off your bracelet?”

“Do you have a soulmate?”

“Have you met him?”

“Do we know him?”

“Do we know her?”

Lily kept her gaze on the ground and pushed past them. Soon she’d be in an area more populated by Muggles, and the reporters would have to fall back. Some of the more discreet ones might tag along for a few blocks; celebrities weren’t so unusual in London that people wouldn’t overlook a nondescript woman flagged by two or three reporters, but they wouldn’t hang on forever. Lily could safely ignore them. She knew this.

Still, she wanted to spit on them. She wanted to set fire to their quills and explode their cameras. She could, her wand was tucked beneath the waistband of her jeans.

No one would realize what was happening until it was too late.

But she didn’t. It wasn’t worth it, she knew that. If she ignored them, if she surrounded herself with Muggles, they’d go away.

She was on her way to the Ministry, was going to take the phone booth entrance because the reporters certainly could not follow her in there.

She was late for an interview with the Department of Magical Research, and wanted badly to duck in a shop and Apparate. But it had happened in the past that a reporter had gotten taken along, entirely or partially, in her or her cousins’ or brothers’ attempts at escaping through Apparation. Witnessing splinching was messy. It might have taught the man who kept grabbing at the sleeve of her jacket a lesson, but she was unsure if it was worth it. She rather thought it would have been, but then. Sometimes she had a heart.

Plus, she didn’t really want to give the papers anything at all to say about her.

She shut the door to the phone booth on the four reporters who had stuck with her through the city, and spoke into the receiver to be lowered beneath the ground.

She breathed out when she was released into the over-large atrium of the Ministry. The room was full, but so few of the people here cared about her last name. None of them would admit to reading the shit the papers were publishing about Albus.

Lily had never expected to feel safe in the Ministry. But at least government officials hated gossipmongers as much as her family did.

:::

Teddy sat in the corner of the Three Broomsticks. He was waiting for Lily, if she decided to show. Lately she’d been better at showing up on time, but Teddy knew that the catastrophe with Albus’s soulmate had taken up a lot of her time. Reasonably so.

He had gone to see Albus in his tattoo shop himself, the other afternoon. Had left the shop with Al after closing, had tried to block him from the photographers and reporters, and had shut the door to Al’s flat in their faces as Al himself belly flopped onto his couch.

“A part of me,” Al had confessed, “thinks that I should have just left well enough alone. Maybe she’d have gotten tired of me, and, if not. Well, at least there wouldn’t be,” he kicked his foot at his door, where the sounds of people milling around on the landing could still be heard.

“If anything,” Teddy had begun heating up water for tea, “that should convince you you made the right decision. Anyone who could do that to you, when you just tried to be honest with her—she’s not worth your time, Al.”

Al had groaned stuffed his hands over his eyes. “I just want them to _stop_.”

“They will,” Teddy had assured him. Hadn’t they always, when Albus was getting drunk and instigating international scandals at three a.m. every weekend? When James ran off to Romania and the papers were full of speculation that he, fortunately, was far enough away to ignore? When Lily disappeared to the States, and there were a few bleached photos of her pulled down from Muggle websites. All of that had blown over.

This, though. Teddy didn’t doubt that what he had told Al was true, the reporters would get bored. But, as he caught sight of a group of camera-wielding witches and wizards approaching the Three Broomsticks, he thought that this one might take longer than the others to go away. Lily was at the middle of that mess, and he knew that they wouldn’t dare follow her inside the pub—the proprietor had made it quite clear they were not welcome in the past—but still he felt he should do something to get her out of the middle of it.

He didn’t though. He sat and waited, using his wand to draw a large potted plant toward him, settling it in the windowsill so that he and Lily would not be visible from the outside.

She came through the door in a rush, glancing around and catching sight of Teddy almost at once. Her scarf was wrapped up to her eyes and her hair blistered away from her face, frizzy with damp autumn air. She stormed to the table, dropped into the seat across from him, and, before she had even finished unwrapping the scarf, asked, “Is there alcohol in that?”

Teddy glanced down at the nearly empty glass in front of him. “There _was_. Let me get you something else.”

He went to the bar, ordered Lily a drink, and looked back at the windows. The reporters were pressed against them. Too close to see Lily through the plant, but they could see Teddy where he stood, and were starting to take pictures.

“Can we block the glass?” he asked the bartender.

She looked past him, at Lily, at the windows, and nodded. “I’ll set the Charm.” It would turn the windows reflective on the outside. Everyone inside would be able to see out. It was a risk, because the reporters would make shit up about what was going on inside, and because it signaled to people in the village that there was someone in the Three Broomsticks who was worth protecting, but it was a Tuesday evening, and Teddy believed Lily deserved as much of a break as he could give her.

She had her head down on the table by the time he returned with her drink. “You know that’s gross?” He set the drink in front of her and she lifted her head slightly to look through the amber liquid at him.

“Don’t care. I am so tired.”

“How’d the interview go?”

Lily shrugged. “All right. I think I got it. Which I should, seeing as how I’ll be free labor, and all. I don’t know why they make you go through the struggle of interviewing for unpaid positions, they could just gather us up and populate their whole Department.”

“They’ve got to check you out, you know, make sure you won’t go on unauthorized searches through their archives.”

Lily sat up. “Did Al tell you about that too? Someone at the Ministry will hear if he keeps blabbing on about it.”

“James did.” Teddy laughed. “And I bet someone already has, they just haven’t confronted you about it.”

“Ridiculous,” Lily muttered, “all of you.”

“Only a little bit.” He leaned forward. “You know what I find the most ridiculous.”

Lily took a drink and cocked her head. “What’s that?”

“The fact that you were in the Department of Mysteries,” he kept his voice low; no one in Hogsmeade typically had it out for any of the Potters, being so close to Hogwarts and having watched them grow up, but it was never a sure thing, “and you only looked up stuff about soulmate marks.”

Lily’s face brightened, her smile widening. “Oh, Teddy, no. That’s just what I looked up at first.”

He rocked back in his chair. “What else?”

“You’ll find out eventually. Maybe.” She sighed. “They didn’t really have what I wanted on the soulmate marks, to be honest. Muggle stuff is better.”

“So instead you went looking for…?”

Lily shook her head. “Anything I wanted to, of course. It was the Department of Mysteries _._ ”

:::

The first day Al came outside to find only two reporters leaning against his building, he thought maybe he was still asleep and dreaming.

A week later, when the pavement outside was empty, he thanked the fickleness of the human attention span fervently and repeatedly on his walk to work.

A week after that, when two days had passed with absolutely no mention of him in any paper that he could find, he started to breathe easier again.

And three days later, of course, he came downstairs to find her standing at the lamppost just outside the door to his building.

She watched him approach. He thought about ignoring her, wondered which would be the least reproachable way to behave, realized it didn’t matter, because he had already done that and she had not responded in kind, and lifted his chin in acknowledgment.

She pushed away from the lamppost and walked alongside him. She didn’t say anything.

He bit his tongue to stop himself from laying into her, from asking, at the very least, “Are you happy now?”

“I know you hate me,” she finally said. It struck Albus that she was probably the sort of person who thrived on a fight, that she’d thrown everything she had at him, and it distressed her, maybe, that he hadn’t fought back. If Lily were here, or James, or Rose, even, Lucy, this woman would have been verbally eviscerated by the time they reached the post office two blocks down from his building. If it were Lily or Luce, she’d probably have been physically attached. Punched, at the very least.

Lucky for her, then, that it was only him.

“I,” Albus started. He didn’t know her to hate her. He hated what she’d done, hated that her initials were on his wrist. But Sara Thomson, as a person? He was overwhelmingly indifferent toward her. “I,” he continued, “think this whole thing could have been handled better.”

“‘This whole thing’,” she included the air quotes, which Albus appreciated because he could imagine the expression on Rose and Lily’s faces when he described this to them later, “being our futures.”

“I told you,” and he had, “that I’m sorry I don’t want the normal thing, the thing everyone wants, the thing you want. I know that’s unfair to you and I,” she, he reminded himself, had not even deserved his apologies at the start. She certainly did not deserve them at this point. “It’s not my fault, you know,” he said. It would have been smarter to have ignored her, to have continued walking in silence. “It’s not my fault fate fucked up and matched us. It’s not my fault that I don’t want what you want.”

“But why,” she said, “are you so abnormal?”

If someone Albus loved had said something to him like that, he knew he would have seized up entirely. He would have been on the ground shaking, or red and hot and livid. As it was, this woman, who could have meant the world, who, in another universe, could have at the very least been his closest friend, her opinion meant nothing. Albus was able to laugh a little.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s to do with the reporters that have been trailing me since I first made the mistake of smiling at one of them. Maybe the fact that you want my name more than you want me.”

She stopped walking to stare at him. “I don’t think,” she started, but Albus shook his head.

“I’ve let you have much more than your say in this. I would rather we not,” he waved between them, “I would very much rather we never saw each other again.”

He turned and walked away, quickening his pace as much as he could without it being obvious that he was running from her.

That evening, after he and his coworkers left work, a couple of them went to the Leaky for drinks. Albus caught sight of Evie, his friend with the Floo connections, sitting in a corner. He approached her, sat down.

“I’ve seen a lot about you in the papers lately,” she said.

“Yeah, you and the rest of the world.”

“Need something?” She was drinking a Snakebite, grinning at him.

“To get to Romania. Tonight.”

She laughed, shoved her drink at him. “Easy, sweetheart.”

“Come visiting?” Ioana asked, when she came down the stairs from her flat to find him dusting himself off outside the fireplace tucked into the back room of the shop.

“I want a tattoo,” he told her, and she flicked on the light overhead and looked at him, really looked.

“Okay, Albus. Just tell me where and what.”

He undid his bracelet, dropped it to the floor. “You pick for me,” he said, “please.”

Her lips rolled tight together, she gestured him to the chair.

She gave him a detailed fish, fins swirling out over his forearm. It looked like a betta fish, a different species and much more artful than the first tattoo he had done, the one he had given her. He loved it, but it didn’t really matter what it looked like. It covered up the arrow and initials on his wrist, which was, of course, why he had come back to Romania.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This time, I know for certain that the next chapter will be the last one. Making progress!


	11. chapter ten

Teddy’s classes on Harris started two days after the Hogwarts term ended. He Flooed to James’s cottage in the late evening, hours after the last carriage for Hogsmeade Station had left, and stepped out into the living area, carrying only a magically-enlarged suitcase.

He’d seen the bottom halves of everything in the room from a few Floo sessions over the term, but the angle from the fireplace hadn’t allowed him to see the whole room. It was small. The rocking chair was spindly, the couch patched, the bright red blanket slumped in one corner the only bright spot of color in the room.

James was waiting for him, sitting on the couch with one leg tucked beneath him, drinking something that looked like whisky. He held a book but he wasn’t reading; he was watching Teddy.

Teddy let go of his bag.

“Hey.”

James set his book on the scratched coffee table, rested his glass on top of it, and stood. “Hi.”

This feeling was one of acute awkwardness. Teddy wished Lily had arrived with him. She would have sat down and broke the tension by drinking from James’s glass and putting her feet on his couch. But she was working until the weekend before Christmas. It was going to be just James and Teddy for a while, and this feeling could not be broken by Teddy imitating Lily, because she was everything he wasn’t.  The reverse, he supposed, was true. But right now that didn’t matter much, because the reverse meant that he was shit at breaking this silence.

And then, miraculously, James grinned at him. “Good thing we’re not basing our futures on this moment right here.”

“What a mess they would be,” Teddy agreed.  
James waved his wand at Teddy’s bag and began floating it across the room. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

They followed the suitcase four or five steps through the living room to the stairs, which sat between the living room and the kitchen. James waved his hand through the doorway. “Everything’s pretty straightforward in there. The front burner’s a little slow to catch, but if you prod it with your wand it works fine.”

Teddy shook his head. “How many times have you almost blown this place up?”

“Not as many as you might think,” James said easily. He nodded Teddy up the stairs. “Here’s the bath,” they passed a narrow door at the start of the hall, “the first bedroom, the second bedroom.” Two more doors. “There’s a wardrobe in there,” James gestured at the second bedroom, “if you want to unpack. And there’s enough space in there for you to set up your cauldron, if you want. I figure you’ll need to prepare for classes and stuff, and there’s really nowhere else in the house it could work.” James rubbed the back of his neck. “You don’t have to stay in there, though—the first bedroom’s,” he coughed, cheeks red, “big enough.”

Teddy nodded. “Yeah, okay.” He pushed open the door to the second bedroom, watched as James lowered his wand to set his suitcase on the narrow bed.

“It’s kind of stupid,” James stuck his wand in the pocket of his jeans and, turning, walked Teddy back into the doorframe. The narrow frame ran against Teddy’s spine. His heart stuttered.

“What is?” Teddy’s voice sounded too loud and too much. The question itself was stupid; he knew what James meant.

“How strange we’re making this.” James bit his lip, eyes catching Teddy’s. “Lily’s not even here yet. This is what we’re used to.”  
“But it’s the anticipation, isn’t it?” Teddy touched a fingertip to the dip in James’s chin, felt stubble. “That’s what’s making it weird.”

“Of Lily?”

“Of Lily,” Teddy agreed. “Of all—of everything we’re doing.”

“Okay.” James kissed him, finally, and in the near-silence, the movement of their mouths, everything was the way it was supposed to be.

“Okay?” Teddy asked.

“Then it’ll be weird.” James stepped back, freed Teddy from the wall. “I’m glad you’re here, anyway. For the weirdness.”

Teddy liked the dry tone James got when he talked about them, all of them. He reached out and ran a hand through James’s hair, sent it sticking straight up in spots. James watched him, eyebrows raised.

“You, you know,” Teddy said. “Just ridiculous.”

“You.” James shook his head. “Nonsensical.”

:::

A few days before Christmas Lily stepped from James’s fireplace into a staggering domestic scene. There were candles lit on every worn surface, the heavy smell of a meat pie filling the room from the narrow hallway, a garland draped over the slab of mantle piece at her shoulders, James and Teddy standing with glasses of whisky, Teddy holding two. She blinked at them.

“How was the trip?” James asked. Lily shrugged one shoulder, her bag swinging against her hip.

“Fine.” She held out one hand. “That’s mine, right?” An eyebrow raised at Teddy, her tone forcefully sardonic. Teddy bit on the inside of his cheek; his face narrowed.

“I’m doubling up tonight,” he said, but handed her the glass.

She inhaled over the rim of the glass, felt fire in her throat, and let her bag fall to the floor by the fireplace. “Is that dinner I smell?”

“Don’t you want to look around first?” James stooped for her bag, but Lily shook her head.

“You’ve both talked about it enough for me to know that it is tiny. You’ll have plenty of time to show me after dinner. I’m famished and everything smells incredible. Teddy cooked, I bet?”

“Actually,” James left her bag on the floor and followed she and Teddy to the kitchen, “it was a joint effort.”

“Really?” Lily hopped on the table, kicking her feet. Both Teddy and James reached out hands as if to stop her, but when the table’s initial creaking didn’t lead to an immediate collapse they both stopped at brushing a hand against her upper arms, quick, one on each side.

“Really.” James pulled a dish out of the oven, and Teddy got a serving spoon and plates, and they settled into possibly the oddest meal of any of their lives. Odd because it felt normal, and odd because of all the things they were not saying, in talking about the fall and classes and Lily’s internship and the dragon nest James was watching.

All those things went unsaid until the three of them were standing in the bedroom, staring at their bare feet. In the silence, Lily was almost surprised they’d gotten that far.

“Maybe we should have had more whisky?” Teddy suggested, not at all joking.

Lily laughed. “We should be into this, shouldn’t we?”

“I am into this.” James tugged his shirt over his head by the back of the collar, his dragon leaping into view. The sight of it jagged hot through Lily’s gut. She pressed her hand over the dragon’s flame. Teddy was behind James, his hand reaching for the tail, where Lily knew it circled over James’s spine.

James’s hand curved around her waist, thumb brushing over her hip beneath her sweater. Her gaze met Teddy’s over James’s shoulder. His eyes were dark, and she stood on tiptoe to kiss him, her neck against James’s bare skin.

After that it was easier. The three of them, moving together, came more naturally than Lily had thought it would.

Everything happened slowly, but afterwards Lily thought it all took too little time. They should’ve had days for it, a minute for every button undone, hours for every kiss. This was monumental, it was proof of what they had been talking about for years.

They could do this, the three of them.

:::

Magical plants grew in the Hebrides that grew nowhere else in the world. Lily had known this, but hadn’t realized what it meant until she discovered, entirely by chance, a blooming trillanon in a crevice of rock by the cottage one afternoon early in her stay. It was December, nearly freezing out, and this spot of yellow rested over the lichen-covered rocks.

She wouldn’t have known what it was if she hadn’t been researching a tricky warming potion at her internship before leaving for the holidays; herbology hadn’t been her strongest class. But that warming potion had been driving her out of her mind, because it was nearly impossible to find flowering trillanon. The plant itself was incredibly rare, but in bloom? Lily had never expected to find one. She had thought she was going to have to label the potion “theoretical” and move on to the next.

But here was a plant in bloom, right by James’s front door. She conjured a glass jar, dug the plant up using her hands, her fingernails scraping against stones, her skin pale and then red with cold and scrapes, and cast a stasis charm over the plant once it was contained.

This was something, she thought. Maybe something small and almost insignificant, or maybe something huge.

Because what if she could find more? She wouldn’t take them all. She had what she needed. But she could document them, map them. They might get picked at some point, but there was a better chance of finding these plants where they had once been than beginning a new search every time one was needed.

Lily spent the time James and Teddy were at work exploring the Hebrides, taking a buses or boats around, going to Skye and St Kilda and Mull, occasionally Flooing into wizarding pubs, when James or one of the scattered witches and wizards on Harris knew of one.

She had a map she marked. She had a book of rare magical plants and a notebook where she diagrammed and described the ones she discovered. She was finding, in the windy crevices between rocks and cliffs, on the mounds of dryish green earth, a wealth of potions ingredients. She didn’t pick any more, but she plotted each one. She researched each one. She wrote about them, and listed the potions they were used in, the potions she thought they might enhance, and she planned for the future.

Her trillanon flower spent the holidays in its jar on the kitchen table. James sat there, tilting the jar and examining the undersides of the plant’s wide leaves, while Teddy cooked dinner one evening.

“You’re thinking of something,” he said, his nose pressed against the glass bottom of the jar. “To do with this plant. More than that potion, I mean.”

Teddy glanced over his shoulder. “That plant is a miracle.” Lily, sitting on the counter, blew him a kiss.

“It’s my miracle,” she added. “It has inspired me.”

“I know,” James set the jar down, “that’s why I asked what you’re thinking.”

“You didn’t exactly ask, but lucky for you I’m going to tell you anyway.”

“So? Share.”

“So,” Lily rested her chin on her knees, “I’ve been looking for rare plants since I’ve been here and I,” she dipped her head, hair falling over her face and hazing the embarrassment in her voice, “love it so much. It’s incredible, finding them. Researching them. All of that. And I started thinking, if I could do this for my job—well, that would be amazing. And I could. Potions companies are always in the need of rarer ingredients and not many people are equipped to do the searching. But it seems like I am. Plus, it’s a job that requires a lot of movement.” She brushed her hair from her eyes. “Which would work for us.”

James was grinning at her, face split. Teddy squeezed her foot as he passed on the way to the fridge. “That’s perfect for you.”  

“We’ll see if I can get one but,” she leaned her head back, “it’s more direction than I’ve ever had. So I think I’m going to try really hard.”

“And we all know that when you try,” James stood from the table and crossed the room, kissing Lily lightly, “you get what you want.”

“That does seem to be the case,” Lily agreed, kissing him back.

They only stopped when Teddy bumped against James, with a handful of plates, laughing, telling him to make himself useful and set the table.

:::

They all woke up on Teddy and Lily’s last day there, at the beginning of the second week of January, and lay in the bed, staring at the ceiling. Teddy’s hand was on James’s stomach, Lily’s head on his shoulder. He felt buoyant, but with a  premonition of a fall to come. His chest twisted with it.

He shut his eyes.

“We’ll see each other in March,” Lily spoke into the empty cold space of the morning air. “For Uncle Ron’s birthday.”

“That won’t be the same.” James rolled over, dislodging Teddy’s hand. He set his head on Teddy’s shoulder, and he and Lily talked in warm breaths over his skin. Teddy kept his head back and his eyes shut. Denial, he had decided, was how he was going to handle this day, and all the rest like it.

“April, then? Easter hols. You’ll be here, right? We can do this again.”

James dug his chin into Teddy. “Yeah, that’ll work. But after that?”

“All summer? I’ll be—who knows. Around. If you’re here, or wherever. Summer will be easy.”

None of them said that September would be miserable.

Teddy said, “Can we not talk about this now?”

And Lily kissed his shoulder, said, “We do have much more important things to be doing,” and Teddy didn’t have to think for quite a while longer.

:::

Lily stopped in Edinburgh on her way home. She Flooed to the Red Elephant, ducked into the loo, straightened her scarf so it covered the red bruise James had left on her neck, brushed ash from her coat, and hurried out onto the street, turning toward Newington, where Ris’s flat was.

Ris answered the door with an arm-pinning hug.

“I can’t believe you’re here. How long’re you here for? Can you stay for a week, a month? Can you just stay?”  
Lily laughed, squirmed her way out of Ris’s arms, and ducked past her into her flat. Ris followed, waving her hands around as she showed Lily the kitchen and the living room, with its overstuffed couch and small table crammed into a corner, the hall to the bathroom and Ris’s bedroom, which was, as Lily expected it to be, a mess.

The flat was small and nice and very not Ris—there were no gaudy decorations, no twisting silver candlesticks, no prints of snakes on the walls. No moving photographs of her friends, and the portrait of the green-faced witch she had stolen from one of the dungeons of Hogwarts did not seem to be in evidence. There was an electric kettle by the stove and a pile of books on the table and a Muggle newspaper on the floor by the recycle bin.

“Ris?” Lily turned around, looking at the bland easiness of the flat, looking at her friend, who flushed. “I guess—is everything okay? We haven’t talked as much lately, are you…?”

“I talk to you a lot,” Ris protested. “We talk every day, practically.”

“Texting,” Lily dismissed, “and not about you, really, do we? Not lately.” Lily sat on the couch. Ris came over and sat beside her, crossing her arms. “I’ve asked you about your,” she nodded toward Ris’s bare wrist, “and you didn’t seem to want to answer so I didn’t want to pry, but—is everything okay?”

Ris nodded, shrugged. “Yes, yes, everything is great. The only thing is.” She sighed. “Well, like. He’s a Muggle?”

Lily blinked her surprise. She knew this happened, it had popped up sometimes in the stuff she had read—obviously not in the Muggle works, but at the Ministry, in the books at Hogwarts, there was mention of it. Some of her classmates were the products of marriages between Muggles and wizards. It wasn’t unheard of.

But for Ris—for one of them. It felt like it should have been impossible.

“Are you going to tell him?” Lily asked carefully.

“No. Maybe? Eventually. Not yet,” Ris shook her head. “I like him, Lil, Liam’s exciting and we get along well, it’s just—he’s not the most…imaginative person. Which would be fine, if he were a wizard. But to ask him to accept that our world exists? That’ll probably be harder than I would like it to be. So I’m going to wait.”

“For what?” Lily asked slowly.

“Until he knocks me up,” Ris said, and laughed, and Lily’s gut unclenched because, yeah, that would have ended terribly. “Of course not that. I don’t know, I think I’ll know when it’s time. When I’m sure of him. I’ve only known him for two months, you know? We’ve only really been talking for one.” Ris shrugged. “I’m taking this slow.” She laughed. “If people from Hogwarts could see me now, would they even recognize me?”

Her voice shook a little as she tried on the question, and Lily forced herself to nod. “Of course they would. You’re still the same you you’ve always been.” Although she wasn’t sure. Would the sixteen year-old Ris had done this? Or would she have stormed into her soulmate’s Muggle home, wand out, and set fire to her least favorite piece of art in the home?

Lily thought she knew.

“Anyway,” she told Ris, “it’s not like anyone stays sixteen forever.”

And Ris sighed, dropping her head into her hands.

“I fucking knew it.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” Lily hurried, “it really isn’t.”

“Says Lily Potter, who will never ever change.” Ris lifted her head. “You don’t look any different than you ever have. You don’t act differently.”

“Well, gosh,” Lily elbowed her, “thanks for that.”

“I meant it as a compliment.” Ris tilted her head. “Do you want to grow up? Do you want to be different?”

“Of course I do,” Lily shook her head. “And I have, you just—it’s just not obvious, maybe. I’m interning, you know. I’m going to get an adult job.”  
“Doing what?” Ris’s eyebrow went up, just one, and her tone unnecessarily underlined the doubt.

Lily, flushing, explained her plan.

“You want to be an explorer,” Ris scoffed, “of course you do. And you’ll do it, I bet. But that’s not an adult job, Lil.”

“It’s a very important job,” Lily protested.

Ris held up her hands, “I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m just saying that it’s a job a person who never grows up does. It’ll be perfect for you.”

“It’s a difficult job!”

“I don’t doubt it,” Ris patted Lily’s shoulder, “but difficult and dangerous jobs, risky jobs—you don’t want stability, do you?”  
“Of course I don’t.”  
“Well, there,” Ris told her, “there’s you never growing up.”

“And you do?”  
“Someday. After I tell Liam about magic and that drama clears up. Maybe then. Or maybe never.” Ris shrugged. “We’ll compare notes, yeah? See whether either of us gets what we want.”

“I think we will. I don’t think we have to wait to find out.”  
Ris smiled. “What optimism. _That_ is different.”

“See,” Lily said, “I’m an adult.”

Ris laughed. “We’ll see.”

:::

At the beginning of March, Lily took an arduous Floo home from the Rocky Mountains, where she had been searching for a nearly extinct variety of nightshade. James came in from the Hebrides, and Teddy Apparated from Hogwarts to the Potters’ front living room.

Ron and Hermione had moved to a flat near Hogsmeade, and so Harry had volunteered the Potters’ home for Ron’s birthday party. By the time Albus arrived, the ground floor was full from wall to wall. He caught sight of Lily talking to Louis and Victoire against the doorjamb, James and Rose and Teddy in a corner, Molly and Fred with an aggressively gesturing Roxy on the couch.

Albus slipped into the kitchen, where Ginny was cursing at a casserole dish and Harry was unsuccessfully casting cooking charms over it, trying to salvage whatever it had been intended to be. To Al it looked like a brownish blob of nothingness.

“Luce try cooking?”

His mum jumped. “It was me,” she confessed. “James came in and I got distracted—have you seen the burn he got?”

“Oh, no,” Al turned back toward the living room, “is he all right?”

“It’s healed,” Harry said drily. “He apparently didn’t see fit to tell us about it before it was healed.”

“Because you’d have worried,” Al said.  
“I’m still worried,” Ginny said. “When Charlie got them, it was all fine, but James…”

“He’ll be fine. He’s not an idiot.”

“Well, he’s got a very impressive scar from it. Dragon fire’s nasty.”

“Obviously.” Al returned to the living room, found James, and grabbed his arm, staring at the shiny spread of skin.

“Want that covered up with a tattoo?”

“This? This I’m proud of.” He told Al about the dragon that had given it to him, catching him while he was flying low over hills.

Al shrugged. “If you ever change your mind…”

“Trying to sell to your family now, Al?” Dominique sat down on the arm of the chair James was sitting in. “Business not going well?”

“It’s going very well, thanks very much for your concern.”

“Yeah? Just as good in London as it was in Romania?”

Al shrugged, unsure of the direction of Dom’s tone. “It was fine both places.”

Teddy knocked against Dom’s side. “Hey, you’re just upset because you decided to get a tat before Al came back, and it got fucked up. I told you you should go to Romania for it.”

Al bit the inside of his cheek to prevent his grin from showing. “We could probably fix it, Dom. Bad tattoos aren’t impossible to cover up. Or there’re charms to remove them.”

“Yeah,” Dom rolled her eyes, mouth tight, “but a new tattoo would be expensive—especially a good one. And those charms _hurt_.”

“So do tattoos,” Rose pointed out. “Especially, I imagine, bad ones.”

“It didn’t hurt that much,” Dom protested. “And it’s not that bad. Teddy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Oh yeah?” Al said, “How ‘bout you show us?”

“What about your tattoo, Al? That’s new.”

“Not that new.” Al held out his wrist and everyone, appropriately awed, leaned forward.

“That’s from Ioana?” James asked.

“Yeah.” Al looked up. “Best idea I’ve ever had.”

“I don’t doubt it.” The way Teddy angled forward had him pressed against James. Neither of them shifted. Al wondered if the way their bodies met seemed obvious to anyone else.

He looked around for Lily. She had been in the room moments before but wasn’t anymore.

When he looked back at Teddy and James they’d put about six inches of space between them. James was looking around the room, too. Teddy was watching Al.

Al tried to look intimidating. Teddy shrugged. Dom grabbed his arm and said, voice quiet, “Actually, though, do you think I could get a discount on a cover-up tattoo?”

Al looked over at her. “Maybe. Depends how bad the bad tattoo is.”

“Come on,” she dragged him into the bathroom. By the time he’d seen the tattoo on her side and agreed that she deserved not to have that on her skin forever, James and Teddy were no longer in the living room.

Al considered going to find them, decided he didn’t want to be scarred for life, and sat on the stairs, knowing that despite their idiocy, they deserved at least a vigilant guard.

:::

Lily kissed Teddy fast in James’s childhood bedroom. James was at her back. “This is stupid,” he told her neck.

“Really fucking dumb,” Teddy agreed.

“We locked the door.” Lily was having trouble finding room to breathe. It had been months.

“Against our family. Who know magic.”

“We won’t get another chance.”

“I wasn’t saying we should stop.”

“Just that it is an extremely bad idea,” Teddy added.

:::

Albus tried to look innocent. Invisible. He was sitting on the stairs because all the couches and chairs were taken, no other reason. He scrolled through messages on his phone. He snapped a picture of the party from his slight overhead angle to send to Hugo, who was trapped in Rome taking care of the kids because their parents were on vacation.

Everything was going well. He thought he must have not looked that odd, sitting on the stairs, until his father caught sight of him and his eyebrows went up.

Harry lowered himself to sit beside Albus. “What’s up, Al?”

“Nothing,” Albus answered.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course, I’m fine.”

“Any reason you’re sitting up here?”

“Just wanted to.” Al held out his phone, as if that was an explanation. Harry looked out at the living room, their family. They sat in silence for several minutes.

Then Harry asked, “Where’re James and Lily? And Teddy?”

Albus could feel a flush starting on his neck. He kept looking straight ahead and hoped his father couldn’t tell.

“I don’t know. Lily was here until a little while ago. I was just talking to James and Teddy.”

His father looked at him. Albus didn’t turn his head.

“Albus,” his father covered his mouth, “do you think,” he stopped.

Al still didn’t look at him. He bit the inside of his lip. He hoped his father hadn’t figured it out, and he hoped that he had.

“Are you all going to be okay?” Harry finally managed.

Al looked down at his tattoo. He felt happier than he had in a while. “You know,” he told his father, “I honestly think that we are all going to be good. We are good, really.”

“Okay,” Harry stood. He squeezed Al’s shoulder. “Okay, then.”

Later, when Lily came downstairs, followed minutes later by Teddy and then minutes after that by James, she ruffled Al’s hair. “Thanks,” she said.

He didn’t look up from his phone. “Don’t mention it.”

“Ever,” Lily finished for him, and he grinned at her.

“Does it ever surprise you,” she sat on the step below him, “that we’re all right, all of us?”

“Every day.” He nudged her back with his foot. “We got lucky.”

“I guess we did.”

:::

Lily rented a hotel room in a Muggle hotel in London for a week in May, near the airport and therefore undesirable for most wizards. She was between jobs. James was being transferred to Florence, and Teddy was able to commute; they had seven blissful days of being together and unrecognized in their city. They hadn’t had expectations because none of them had ever thought they'd be able to manage something like this, and it was incredible, just to be there, with the planes overhead.

Lily sat on the bed the morning of their last full day together, twisting her bracelet around her wrist. Teddy, who was returning neatly folded shirts to his suitcase, glanced over at her.

“What’re you thinking?”

James was struggling to zip his case shut. He looked up. “Me?”

“Lily,” Teddy nodded toward her, “she’s gone all serious.”

“This is a migrant relationship,” she said. “It’s never gonna be more than that.”

James gave up on the suitcase and came to sit beside her. “We knew that all along, Lil.” He wrapped an arm around her waist. Teddy sat on her other side, shoulder against hers, James’s hand pressed between them.

“It really sucks. I like independence,” she laughed, “and all, but.” She shrugged. She undid her bracelet, dropped it on the floor. “I wish I could just show this to people.”

They all looked down at her wrist. “What,” Teddy breathed, and then hurried to untie his own bracelet.

James slipped his hand from around Lily and, shaking, undid his.

Their initials were still there, _LP_ and _TL_ thick on James’s, _JP_ and _TL_ , _JP_ and _LP._ But their accompanying arrows were gone.

“I thought we’d have the arrows forever. I thought since we’d never settle—I just thought.” Lily stared at their wrists. “How?”

“Maybe it’s not physical settling so much,” Teddy suggested. “Maybe it’s just—you know, deciding that this is it.”

James touched Teddy's initials on Lily's skin. “And we’re all sure of that now. We’re all sure of us.”

“Almost the only thing I’m sure of,” Lily admitted. Then she squirmed from between James and Teddy. “I have an idea. Grab your coats.”

She Apparated them, one on each side, to Al’s flat. Al was in, lying on the couch, reading a magazine and eating mac and cheese from a bowl balanced on his stomach. He barely lifted his head when they appeared.

“What do you all want?”

“Tattoos,” Lily said, and Al sat up fast, nearly upending his bowl. He stopped it with his wand, levitated it to the table, and stared at them. Teddy had rocked back on his heels when Lily answered, but now he stood still beside her.

“You and Teddy too? For what?”

Lily held out her wrist. “This.”

Albus stared at her arm for a while, then he looked at all of them, a wide smile taking over his face. “I thought you’d never get there,” he said. “What kind of tattoo do you want?”

“You know what kind we want,” Teddy told Al, voice steady.

“Yeah,” Al agreed, “I guess I do.”

:::

“You’re much better than nature,” Lily said later. She looked at the intricate knot on her wrist, the similar but not identical ones on Teddy’s and James’s. The designs completely covered the letters they’d been born with. Here, on their wrists, was Al’s ink holding them together. This was artwork to display.

Here was their choice.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone actually read this whole thing, thank you so much. If anyone only read bits and pieces, thank you so much. I hope whatever of this you read, you enjoyed. 
> 
> I am 100% certain that this is not at all what Ellie expected when she tagged me in that prompt about soulmate marks, and it was not what I expected to end up writing, either. I honestly went into it (as always seems to be the case) expecting it to be 10k at most, and a whole lot simpler, so...well. Things happened.
> 
> Anyway, hope this didn't suck, whatever ridiculous thing it turned out to be.


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